Second week check point, university talk and volcano activity

During week 1 we were able to meet with our hosts, we got a nice tour of the Campus and meetings where they gave us their vision on what they wanted to accomplish during our stay. It’s great to see how engaged they are and the passion they have. I’m certain that they are continuously improving and it’s contagious to Claudia, Jibu and Myself, we have been focused and we have had opportunities to share our knowledge with the University.

We have been already in two classes for Entrepreneurship, first on the international program with around 30 students and then on the regular program with more than 50 students talking about the importance of entrepreneurship skills and how these will help them to have their own businesses or to work for an international corporation like IBM.

Both talks were in English, on the international program as expected the students listened, got the jokes, they had good questions, so language was not a problem. But what surprised me is that on the regular class which was twice the number of students, they also were listening, laughing at the jokes, asking us good questions and this was a great surprise. I’m impressed with the maturity I’ve seen from the students on these two classes.

This has been a great experience for me, I want to thank Lecturer Handini Audita for inviting us to her classes.

We were also invited to another class on Friday but we woke up with Yogyakarta glazed by ash because there was an eruption of Mount Kelud during the night.

Check the blogs from the rest of the team, they have some good before/after pics that are worth it, I won’t upload many pictures because the bandwidth right now is not the best which is understandable, every hotel guest is probably in their rooms because it's not advisable to go outside, they are probably checking their smart phones/laptops to track the news on Mount Kelud volcanic activity.

 Teammates' blogs:

Shannon's blog
Claudia's blog
Elisa's blog
Daniel's blog
YuanYuan's blog
Jayaram's blog
Seth's blog
Rosa's blog
Nicole's blog

Auditorium "Small Medium Enterprise" and Clients Kick Off

Today we had a couple of events, during the morning a big event at the University of Gadjah Mada where several personalities talked, the focus here was to start a series of talks regarding Small Medium Enterprises, Indonesia’s IBM President, government representatives, GMU Rector and other business entrepreneurs talked and encouraged students to become future entrepreneurs.

Then after a nice Indonesian lunch, we had the kick off meeting with our clients in my case I’m going to be working with the University of Gadjah Mada which is one of the biggest and oldest here in Indonesia. We have formed smaller teams, my teammates are Claudia and Jibu, and both have a lot of experience working for IBM, I’m sure I’ll learn a lot from them.

So we are just starting, there are many things to talk with our clients, refine the SoW, priorities, meetings, schedules, etc… but overall my feeling is that they are ready to collaborate with us and make this experience a positive one.

Side note, tomorrow during the first part of the day we will have a community service assignment with 150 children at a library, we will show them the IBM kidsmart games to get them engaged and ready to return more times to the library to use the kidsmart computers.

Here some pictures of the events.