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As a second year MiM, I decided to apply for participation at the Business Games St. Gallen. This three-day event in the beautiful idyllic Swiss city, close to Bodensee, invites 100 European master students with diverse backgrounds and challenges them to solve real-life business cases. The challenges this year were sponsored by Nespresso, Swarovski, Zurich Insurances, BMW and by the godfather sponsor of the event, BDO Switzerland. Five eager FS-students cramped in a car, going on an exciting trip and exchanging thoughts on our expectations and strategies for the challenges: this was the first fun experience! Upon arrival in St. Gallen, we almost immediately dove into the challenges, and I started to find out, indeed, how much I could use my theoretical and practical knowledge I have gained in the MiM. For the BMW case study, we worked on the strategy of BMWi for 2030, and my knowledge from Strategic Management and Marketing class were quite the asset here. Also, my Marketing class was a huge advantage for the next two cases since we worked on the development of a new product line for Swarovski and on BDO’s employer branding. My classes Information Systems and Business Engineering greatly helped me for solving Zurich’s challenge, which was to define a new way for the company to deal with and profit from digitization, whereas our sustainability proposal for Nespresso was greatly influenced by my takeaways from Ethics class.
All around, I was happy to improve on my soft skills, such as presentation style, leading a group of people that have just met each other, and deciding whether to go with your gut feeling or relying on hard facts and data (I can tell you: I’ve learned to rely on my gut feeling more often than not!)
For all future applicants, MiM or other: I strongly recommend going to the St. Gallen Business Games, getting out of your comfort zone and accepting the challenges. Meet new people from all over Europe and discover what it means to be a professional in a dynamic and international environment!
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