2015 Study Trip in Canada

PublishDate:01 Sep 2015  Click:4031

The study trip to Canada with the classmates of GMSCM is a plus for the program. It allows the students to know the McGill Campus in Montreal, attend to lectures with some of the best Professors in the field, know how companies operate in Canada and is a great opportunity to know better classmates of different classes of the program.

The lectures we took in Canada were definitely with some of the best teachers in McGill, the first lecture we attended was with Prof. Morty Yalovsky in analytics, he gave us an introductory course telling how important analytics are today and how companies are paying more attention to it as a competitive advantage.

The second day we had with one of the professors that we already had classes in Hangzhou, Jiro Kondo, Jiro it’s an amazing professor and his lecture in VCs for startups was spectacular. He has experience in the area and with his cases and examples is just impossible not feeling that after his lecture you went up one ladder closer to launch your own start-up.

The last day of lectures, we had the lecture about leadership with Prof. Karl Moore that is a very famous professor in this field and work closely with professor Henry Mintzeberg, also from McGill, he taught us on emerging models of leadership. Several of his ideas came as new and counter-intuitive for us and was a very enlightening lecture.

Every day after the lectures in the morning we visited different companies in Canada, we went to Canada Post, SCI Logistics, Future Electronics and Reitmans. All of the companies are big players of their field in Canada and are doing things differently.

The structure of Canada post is impressive, the number of packages and the complexity of their operations is something hard to see in other places. SCI Logistics has shown us their operations and all the effort they do in adding services to the company in order to be more competitive. The Future Electronics has shown us how they are bringing the distribution of electronic parts to a new whole level and the importance of Asia in their market. In Reitmans we had a view of how retail business distribution centers work and the challenges the face to make sure that they deliver what the stores need on time and in a cost efficient way.

The last day of program we still had a networking meeting with professors and Alumni of the program that are leaving in Canada, this is a great chance to improve your networking and see how the program work out for everyone. The exchange of experiences and contacts is definitely great for all the students that participate in the study trip.  

Besides the entire schedule in McGill, the trip was still a great change for us to know Canada, all the students had time to travel around in some other cities. Some of us arrive before and went to Niagara Falls, Toronto and other cities in Canada. We did a trip together to Quebec City that is a very interesting and beautiful city. I strongly suggest that all the students on the program take the chance of going on the trip at least once during the program.

Contributor: George Manske (GMSCM 2013)