Pre-defense day

Pre-defense should start in a couple of minutes. Room is already full of people, some looking a bit nervous. Almost all are looking tired. The groups are different than in previous seminars, meaning I wont be able to see the presentations of some familiar faces, but then again I will see some that I have never seen before which is nice. Sooooo niiiice.

I am presenting after the lunch at 13:00. Pretty happy with my slides, although I must be a time-nazi to make it fit in to 20 minutes. During my last practice run my presentation lasted 20 minutes and 30 seconds.

There is no clock in the room....

Academic year over!!

The first academic year is now pretty much over for us. Yesterday we had thesis seminar which wasnt that bad actually. Some people have ideas what they are doing and some not. I guess I got a bit better view to my topic based on the comments and feedback. At the moment my topic is something like "Business partner selection in international expansion". The idea would be to investigate how SMEs make decisions with who to partner and what are the success factors in partnering. Also, I would be interested in finding out what kind of methods or tools can be used by SMEs on the selection. I will still have to think about it a bit more and go to talk with a possible supervisor at LUT.


We also had an exam on international high tech marketing, which was kinda similar to last years. I was well prepared and could have answered all the questions of the exam. Unfortunately for me, I slightly misread one of the essay questions and thus went off-topic. Luckily, it was worth only 10/100 points so I should not have ruined my chances of good grade because of that. I hope. 


Later in the evening we had a sauna + bbq session by the lake. That was by far the best party of this semester! It was fun and very good to see (almost) all the students of our class there together for the last(?) time before graduation next year. Somehow it was and is unreal that I wont see many of my friends live again this year, because they are leaving Finland for their internships and then going on exchange, some of them really far. I will miss them for sure.

Mmmkay, this is going to be ugly

Disclaimer: this is going to be a rant. If you are not interested in reading negative post, then don't read it.

Then to the issue itself. I am now sitting in a research seminar. The idea of this would be to think about our thesis's or dissertations. Which are due in about 1.5 years and should be started maybe one year after today. One year. And still we are here in the classroom listening to these presentations about whatever. Okay, that's not that bad. But the thing that this guy is expecting us to write some kind of research proposals soon for our dissertations....

WE DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT ARE OUR TOPICS YET!

...and its very nearly impossible to know them at this point. So what is the point of doing some research proposals when you know they don't have any value for anyone? I have no idea.

But that's not all. The teacher is expecting us to write a blog about our thesis's, start using Google calendar with all the milestones and as a cherry on the top of all this make a 5 minute YouTube video about our thesis proposal! Hahaha.

Video. About thesis proposal.

How is that going to help me with my thesis? How is that going to make me write or finish the work with better results? How will all that bring extra value for my research?

The thing is: it doesn't. All it does is to help me waste my time doing some stuff that does not make any sense, does not help in any way and does not bring any value to anyone.

I mean. I have already written one master's thesis and I know what the process is like. I know what are the parties that are interested in the research (yourself, university, company), what helps in the process and what does not. And frankly, none of this bs what we are doing now does not matter at all.

CSR, thesis stuff and World bank

Well, I haven't updated my blog for a while it seems. School life has been quite normal. On Thursday we had this research seminar for our thesis's where every MITIM-student had to present their topic for their thesis. Which was basically total waste of time, because basically no one knows at the moment what is their topic, do they write it as an assignment to some company etc. But well... I guess this has something to do with the Russian educational system and the fact that all master students are expected to start their thesis process in the beginning on master program. Luckily, it doesn't have that much weight on anything - just something that needs to be done. My topic was "Internalization challenges and strategies for SME IT-company". The idea would be to first identify the challenges for expansion to foreign markets and then create a strategy with the company on how to execute the expansion. Quite an interesting topic I think, but it requires whether or not I would be able to find a partner company or companies. Let's see.

I spend a couple of days with my parents here in St.Pete. They came here on Thursday and left on Sunday. It was nice to see them, it had been almost two months since the last meeting.

Today we had our second lecture on Corporate social responsibility (CSR). It's quite an interesting topic, but for whatever reason I've had really big problems on concentrating on those classes. We learned about ethical decision making. Also, all the students made a quick 10 minute test to determine our levels of ethics. It seems that I am "ethically challenged" :D Oh well.

After CSR lecture was a quest lecture from World Bank. It was quite interesting overall. Basically, they presented the idea of 3 D's (Distance, Division and Density) that explain to extent the economic growth. The idea is that these big clusters (usually in big cities) help the developing countries to grow and gain some international stature in the business world. Mobility of the workforce and removing artificial barriers are in key role in here. The speaker demonstrated many examples so it was easy to understand what she meant. It just made it more clear that world is really coming more and more urban and that people living in rural areas likely have to relocate if they want to be part of the growth and get the benefits from it. Which kind of makes the Finnish areal development seem futile.. And to be honest, it pretty much is fighting against the windmills - I don't like the way it is going, but sometimes you just have to accept the facts and adapt.