Graduation days over

We had our graduation days last Thursday in LUT and Saturday in St.Pete. I was one of the few lucky ones who got the diploma also from GSOM (only 5 non-Russian students got it...). For the rest, they are now entering the nostrification process again with their freshly printed Finnish Masters. Graduating from Russia shouldn't be a problem, but it will take some time. I really do hope that everyone will get their double degree.

The ones who didnt get the GSOM diploma, got just a transcript of records. Lousy ones that is. For example on one student the contact hours during the course was according to the transcript something like 4700 which is obviously ridiculous. Also the grades weren't right for most courses and some courses were twice on the list while some where missing. Ridiculous.

Russian graduation ceremony was definitely more ceremonylike than that at LUT. Started well, before it collapsed in to pieces (because of taking photos, unorganized ending etc). All the graduates wore the gowns which was a cool experience. Kinda felt like Harry Potter - especially since we got also the school mascots which is an owl.

Good memories from that day as well as from the whole program. From academic point of view I am a bit disappointed, but as a life experience MITIM has been truly awesome.

Yahoooooo, going on exchange during the 3rd semester

Now just need to apply to exchange places through LUT. The deadline of applications is already tomorrow, so I need to be quick to decide where I want to go. We MITIM-students can also utilize the GSOM partner-university network and I am seriously thinking about applying to one of those options. But first I'll be applying through LUT before we know what are the options through GSOM. If I prefer to go to GSOM partner, I can then delete my application from LUT and make room for someone else wanting to go.


7 of us 35 MITIM students can go on exchange during the 3rd semester. The selection was made based on academic results (i.e. average from our studies from GSOM).


Interesting times indeed.

Grading in GSOM

I got the grade for MIC yesterday. I got 93/100.... and it resulted in to B. A classmate of mine got 98 and still got only a B!

Hahahah, the grading system in GSOM is totally fucked up. I am happy to get rid of it.

I also got the instructions how to make our last exam, Qualitative methods of business research. It is an online exam and the deadline for it is 28th of Dec at noon Russian time. Not that easy peasy it seems, since in the instructions it says that it takes about 4 hours to complete it... And of course they do not support Mac, so I have to find another computer to work that shit on. Luckily, that should not be a problem here at home.

I am so happy to get rid of all this bullshit in few days....

GSOM is "the best business school in Russia"

Yeah, right. Then the level is not that great.... Here is the link to the news.

Knowledge management exam

We had an exam on knowledge management on today. Well, yesterday... I spent almost the whole Monday on reading the stuff for that - 5 or 6 articles, 8 slide sets etc. Luckily I had read most of the course articles (10 out of 15) during the course so the challenge wasn't too overwhelming.

The exam was pretty much the kind that I expected - few mini-cases and then 10 smaller questions. We had 2,5 hours to write the exam which was quite generous, especially compared to Technology management... Once again it was open book exam.

Which I can not understand.

These open book exams are in GSOM are totally useless for most part, because a lot of the questions are directly from the slides. So when a question is asked, you just check from the right slide set and write down what you can see. Basically, with good index and all the course material you can cope with all these things without that much preparation.

And because of these stupid questions almost everyone will get exactly the same points from these questions. Which is ridiculous and just leads to situation where most of the people has something like 90 points from 100 and missing two points can mean two grades. Not nice at all.

Well, lets see how are the results. We should get them during next week. Lets hope for good grade.

Language studies... очен плоха

I attended my first Russian class in more than one month, I believe it has been something like 5 weeks since the last time. Why has it been that long?

Well, there is an interesting answer. The way GSOM has organized the language studies is not optimal at all. We have 4 classes of language per week, 45 minutes each. For almost every group those are during the same day. This means that if you miss the class for whatever reason, it immediately results in quite a long break from your studies. And with this kind of rhythm you are doing your homework only once a week. So one class + one day of homework means you study the language twice a week. Which is way too little in my opinion.

It would be so much better to split the 4 lessons in 2 pieces, one class on Tuesday for example and another on Thursday. With this split, you would have to do homework also twice a week. Which equals to 4 times a week which is so much better than only twice.