Written by: Afonso Nunes, Exchange Student from Portugal
I took this course as a part of the Chulalongkorn University, BBA program. The course had some unique characteristics: around half of the students were Thai, and of that, half were international students participating in an exchange program in Bangkok. This broad range of students in this class suits the class well because as the name of the course suggests, the more international the course’s students the better it will be taught. I believe that this class will be comparable to the real life experiences students will face in the upcoming years when starting the working life.
- For Thai students, it will be more and more common to work with local people and expats, especially in multinational companies, in a manner similar to the environment in the class, where new people come in with totally different ideas and mostly from western countries.
- For international students, the classroom diversity is comparable to future work with expats. Moving to a different culture, to a different city, and working with new people with different mentalities, ideas and work ethics, this is the scenario that expats face when working abroad.
Ajarn Yayus Mak's experience is easily identified by the amount of worldwide examples presented and discussed in class. The teacher is open minded in that she tries to take the best from your own idea and you will always receive feedback. For example, in class we studied and discussed many real life international marketing examples from all around the world. We began with the most innovative and the best advertisements campaigns in Sweden with Volvo and then made our way to the more typical Honda commercials in India.
We also had three guest speakers from different industries, namely gaming, banking, and advertising/media, that showed us how fast the world is currently changing. If you want to be successful in the marketing sector, you will need to think "outside of the box," otherwise you won't create the appeal that customers need to feel to go for your product. The guest speakers also showed us how a company needs to adapt in each part of the world and how different people behave toward advertisements. Basically we had an idea how it is to work for a multinational marketing company or a multinational company in a marketing business.
In class the topics covered ranging from globalization to every little detail we need to take into account before deciding how to approach a certain segment of the market.
For me the best part about this course was its PRACTICALITY. We can apply our knowledge and what we have learned in class. Plus, we had total freedom to decide which path each group wanted to follow to solve every study case and present it so the whole class would know/evaluate how the groups had done and compare each group’s approach to their own. I believe this approach is the best was to learn: by thinking, trying and reflecting within a group with a broad span of ideas and ways of thinking stemming from each group member’s individual background. The lack of restrictions given let each group come up with creative ideas that could work in a real life case for an actual company. All the group projects were past real life cases of well-known companies, which challenged us as we actually faced a problem within a company.
I would describe this course as "applying the abroad experience in real life, in study cases," because I feel like most of the groups experienced a cultural shock in the beginning. But as the semester went by, the groups start to adjust themselves to what had to be done and how it should be done.
I learned that in marketing, even a simple detail about what, how, where, when and why to sell/advertise can make all the difference in the outcome.
Overall, this course is one I will surely use in my future either as an accountant or as an economist. I can say that all the work I put into it was worth it due to the outcome of the reports and the learning I took from away. I highly recommend this course to all students that haven’t yet enrolled in it.