Gianpaolo (25) started the Master in International Management at IE Business School (Madrid) in April 2010. In his second Master blog he he summarizes his first three months in the program and finishes his Master blog with a remarkable advise.

Hi again guys,

I think we all have heard about what a master in a top B-school can help you achieve, such as access to better job opportunities, give you more tools to analyze why a great idea is not working as expected, or simply to help you shape the business idea that you want to undertake. What I would like to share with you here, is not what you will get at the end (rankings can give you some insights about that), instead I would like to tell you some of the things that you might face during the trip to get "there". Let's start....

The initial three months of the Master in Management were quite tough, almost from day one, group assignments were given and the amount of work did require every single member to participate and do its best in order to produce something good enough to be, in the worse case, as good as the other groups.

Many different management courses were starting and ending during the same period. Some courses were very similar to the ones I had during my University, and many others were completely new (which required a lot of reading, discussion and asking for help to my classmates who had more expertise in those areas).

One of the best things that this experience brought, was to get to know my Master in Management classmates and to see how the label that I used to categorize them was continuously changing and evolving. Initially they were just classmates, then colleagues, then partners, and finally, friends. Over the time I got to understand that they are not only great people, but also, great professionals and that they are trying to shape a better and more ambitious future through hard-work and determination. Is difficult to know exactly what the future is preparing for us, but now I have in my network top: colleagues, partners and friends.

Outside classes, the different clubs at IE Business School were always organizing events to strengthen the student network, and to foster the discussion of important issues (business and non-business) that are currently affecting one or more economies around the world. Short-term tactics and long-term strategy was always an important aspect of these discussions.

To finish my post I would like to give you an advice that I have learned during these months: Bury the phrase: "Isn't that obvious"? The answer to this question in my experience is: "absolutely not". At the beginning it was a bit annoying the fact that things that were so clear to me from an "engineering point of view", could get so many "buts" from the other guys. Now, I think that one of the things I have enjoyed the most is to be part of a discussion in which an "obvious good idea" is taken, then is smashed and re-built it from scratch using the inputs and suggestions from the other classmates (psychologist, other social sciences, engineers, business people, so on). I feel that my expectations regarding my MIM classmates were more than exceeded, and I am very thankful for that.

Hope to see you around soon,

Gianpaolo Tepedino
Master in International Management Candidate 2010-2011