Arnaud Bacye
Welcome back to "My Week in ESTEEM" where students reflect upon their experiences in our program. This week's blog is brought to us by Arnaud Bacye, a Notre Dame graduate, who discusses the last week of his semester before reading days.
After taking on a bit of holiday weight from a delicious African meal (organized by the African Association and one of our dear ND Professors), and an American dinner (at an old classmate’s) for Thanksgiving, this overall relaxing break came to a halt, and it was time to get back to work. Walking through campus on Sunday afternoon, I could see the campus slowly regaining its population. Mixed feelings could easily be inferred from individual faces: happy to be back and tormented by finals not being so far away.
This week hasn’t been as busy as last week, with chapter 3 of our thesis due; and three of our courses -- IT, Business Law, and Ethics -- terminated. Our class on Current Trends in IT concluded this week with the final lecture on information security, which essentially consists of processes taken to defend one’s information from unauthorized use, access and disclosure. We also had our last lecture of the semester (until the second part during the spring) for our Ethics class, which I very much enjoyed. The discussion this week related to the impact and role of technology in the environment and our efforts towards sustainability. It is always interesting to get various perspectives on a particular topic, and I appreciated hearing what my classmates had to say about this particular view of technology being the source of environmental destruction. One little stressful aspect of this week was getting ready for our final quiz in Business Law and submitting our final report on the Intellectual Property Landscape of our thesis project technology. For the quiz, the concepts ranging from contractual laws to product liabilities were quite straightforward to comprehend, with the exception of non-compete agreements whose enforceability varies depending on numerous factors.
In the middle of the week, a group of us volunteered to attend the ESTEEM info session at Innovation Park, not for the free food (delicious by the way) but mainly to encourage any of the ND students eager to learn more about ESTEEM. We wanted to reiterate that this technology entrepreneurship program is certainly a great fit for anyone willing to add on to their technical background a business skillset, and a set of best practices for turning ideas and technical concepts into viable ventures.
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Speaking of business enterprises, our marketing simulation game (actually more of a competition) was still happening. My team, once again, proved that the only thing better than Microsoft is Microhard (the name of our company). This week was the second to last round of the simulation, and after tense debate last week on where to open a new sales office, and how much to spend on advertisements for our various products, we ended up with an agreed-upon plan of action, which actually worked wonderfully, as we are currently leading our industry.
There are only 2 weeks before the end of the semester. To all ESTEEM students, let’s finish strong and be excellent!