Hi, my name is Mario Moreno. I’m student of 4th Business and Marketing Bachelor and I´m going to start talking about one project called Markstrat…but what is Markstrat? Markstrat is a mix of two words: Marketing + Strategy. Is a project that belongs to the Dukenet network an international association of universities in the field of commerce and business, gathering private and public institutions. Focused on discovering, developing and implementing modern solutions in research and education. After all that explanation I´m going to share with all of you my experience in that program:
It all begins on Saturday, February 10, 2018. We landed at the Bucharest International Airport without any idea of what is going to happen. We entered in a project that was very attractive, curious and we knew that we would be very helpful for the future and our work life.
We took an Uber (it is the mode of transport that they advised us) to our hotel since we were going to visit the capital the weekend before the competition began.
During all the weekend all the people were nervous. We didn´t know what was going to happen: how was the game going to work? Will it be difficult? What about our partners? All those doubts were in our minds all the time.
“If I could do the project again, I would do it without hesitation”
Finally, the day arrived, they gathered all the participants in a great room to explain the game and make the work teams. Once the groups were made, each team went to the assigned room to start playing. We start with round 0, which is a training round to familiarize ourselves with the program. In total, the game consisted of 10 rounds that were like a fiscal year in the program. The teams had to choose which decisions to make in each round: price, volume of production, level of investment in R & D, in advertising, etc.
I must say that round 0 was one of the most complicated rounds for me. My team and I were disorganized and we lost a lot of time making decisions. However, things changed for everyone. As the rounds passed, all teams began to deepen relations with their respective teammates and that made us enjoy and learn a lot from the competition.
We began to understand the behavior and the way of working of each one of the members of the team, we learned to identify the qualities and strengths of each one and to know how to take advantage of them. For example, one of the qualities I did not know I had and that my colleagues discovered was that it was very good identifying the consequences of certain decisions, which helped us to know if we should take that path or change the perspective and adopt another different way.
Round after round people saw the result of their effort. Some teams did quite well and others did not. But we knew that winning was not the important thing but was learn, to meet new people from all over the world, to know what pressure is like in real life that is not comparable to the pressure of university life.
Knowing and learning to work with people who think differently, who speak differently and have a different way of acting than yours is something that we knew would enrich us forever and you cannot buy it anywhere. Even though we knew all that, people and I included, we took it very seriously, because realistically, everyone likes to win and you feel bad when you lose.
“The most important is to have a good team, with good relations among all of you and to strengthen and support each other in all situations”
To feel the pressure of having to be thinking 100% of the day to know or try to find out if the decision you made will give the expected results, something that is hard to bear. However and most important it is to have a good team, with good relations among all of you and to strengthen and support each other in all situations.
If someone asked me, “Mario, what do you get as experience of the project?” Without hesitation a second would say that my team, the relationships with the people of the project and above all, the experience of knowing that everything we have learned with the game is something that will serve us for our future.
In short, if I could do the project again, I would do it without hesitation. It is a week of maximum stress and competitiveness that although you know that there is no reward and it is only done to learn, the idea that your decisions can make you reach the top or go deeper allow us to be closer to the real life in a company.
