¿Qué pasa?
When you arrive in Madrid, be prepared that you will hear this question very often. It´s the same as “What’s up?” in English, usually the rely will be¨Nada¨(Nothing). Well, actually this is far from the case. Your life at IE will be FULL every single day.
Multinational…as always!
The current year IMBA program in IE constitutes students coming from over 50 countries and regions. We are virtually working with classmates and professors from all over the globe, and Chinese students here are absolutely minorities. We have finance guru from Kuwait, engineer from Egypt, investment-banker from Switzerland” you name it, we have it.
Cultural shocks almost every day. In my last class of Quantitative Analysis, when the prof. wrote down his telephone number on the blackboard, one classmate jerked out in a super HIGH key:
-Tomáz, is this for GIRLS???
The whole class burst in to laughter, while the prof. turned around and said
-Dear class, as you all know, he is Italian”
Before last Christmas, all the girls in my class gathered to have a chicas´ dinner(girls only). Well, 14 girls coming from 13 different countries, you can imagine how eye-catching our table was! Of course, the girls´ topic is universal”by the way, we did enjoy the gossip that night…
Fiestas
Spaniards are well-known for their night life. This relates to the life pace of local people. We usually have class from 0900 till 1500. That is, lunch comes after class” starving? but this still matches with the normal lunch time in here (1400-1600)! Dinner time is after 2200″ and then, after midnight, fiestas! You can switch from one bar to another for the whole night(I should say the whole morning).. and going home at eight o´clock is not big deal.
Sounds a little bit crazy, right? ja, welcome to Spain! Here you have superb music and superb peers- irresistible.
IE has a famous club named Bar of the Week, which serves as a fantastic platform for networking. Somehow you will find another side of your classmates in the bar as compared in classroom”and you will get to know who are genuine party animals gradually.
After all, don´t forget to attend the class later at 0900, and be prepared for all the assignments!
Enjoy…
A quote from a classmate: Study hard, play harder!
Very ture.

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