20 down, 5 still standing: RKC Microeconomics Residential
Posted on 22. Apr, 2010 by admin in Featured
24 students, 1 professor, 1 topic: Michael E. Porter on Corporate Strategy and Competitiveness and 1 location: Technopark in Zurich. Students were coming from all over the place: Nigeria, US, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Morocco, Russia, UK, Egypt etc. The one-week-residential was supposed to take place from April 19 till 23, 2010, 24 students had signed in and confirmed. Then of course, the icelandic volcano struck! My fellow-students were stuck on international airports! Monday morning, the class was pretty modest: Ildiko from Hungary, the professor and me! Ildiko suffered a 12-hour-long train ride from Budapest in a sleeping wagon (third floor bed with the suitcase in her arms). Monday afternoom, Bernie from Qatar arrived totally worn out after a day long odysee from Doha to Rome by plane, then from Rome to Milan by train, switching trains in Milan and in Chiasso to make it to our class in Zurich in the afternoon. Meanwhile, the rest of students remained missing and angry considering their comments on the RKC website’s forum. Then Tuesday afternoon another survivor of the traffic crisis: Joana made it from Maputo in Mozambique by plane to Lisbon where she had to stay for 2 days before making it on another plane Tuesday morning to Zurich where she arrived in the late afternoon. And finally, there’s the professor coming from the UK: With his flight cancelled, he took the train and was in Zurich by Monday.
The world might be a village sometimes. But only with air traffic up and running. This experience clearly demonstrated the incredible power of nature and the powerlessness of us people to react to it.
Fadi Dalileh
Apr 27th, 2010
Hi Gergina, beautiful article , we all shared the sufferings of our colleague students who could not come and attend the residency and we wished that they could be present at the course but it was bad luck again, at any way we had enjoyed the small group classes at the residency and it was nice and pleasure meeting you and Ildiko and all other wonderful friends from around the world, hope to meet you again may be in Switzerland or at any other country , as you said the world might be a village sometimes. I wish you the best of luck in your studying and career and hope to hear from you soon.
Note: your blog is very lovely and organized
Regards
Fadi Dalileh