What are the students doing during the confinement?
Current Spanish student Jordi Barbany Bofill from Barcelona joined the MSc in Finance at emlyon business school in 2019 after completing a double degree in Business Administration and Engineering of Industrial Production at UIC Barcelona and Polytechnic of Turin. During the current confinement in Europe due to COVID-19 outbreak he has taken the time to reflect on the program and why is happy to have made the choice to join emlyon business school.
Now that I had to come back to Spain to spend the COVID-19 confinement with my family, I look back and realise how well I was in Lyon and at emlyon business school. Nevertheless, I really hope to come back soon and spend some quality time with all my classmates before the end of the semester. That’s why I would like to highlight here some of the key points for why I chose to do this Master.
First of all, I chose to do the MSc in Finance because my professional objective is to work in investment banking or corporate finance, and to do so I believed that it was a wise choice to enrol to this Master to get more knowledge, experience and network. Also it was a must to do it in a well-known university because of the huge competition of the sector, and emlyon business school perfectly suits into this parameters.
Leaving all the rankings aside, which, as you may know emlyon business school is a really well known university around France and Europe, I would like to focus more on qualitative aspects.
From my experience, I have really enjoyed this year from the very first day. In early September, emlyon business school offers an investment banking summer track to some students, doing conferences with expertise, workshops or mock interviews, which really helps us with our future projects. Regarding the classes, we have been doing a big amount of group projects, presentations, and face-to-face sessions with professionals and academics of the sector. In the meantime, the university also offers a lot of events for the students like careers fairs, where more than 130 companies came to the campus to recruit last year students, conferences of professionals, for example from Big 4 companies to provide first hand experience, covering a wide range of topics and many associations and activities you can enroll in, in my case I’m a player of the rugby team and an ambassador.
Finally, one of the differentiation points of the program has is the different trips they offer during the course. In November we went to Shanghai for a week for a learning trip where we attend to some conferences of Chinese and French academics explaining their experience in doing business in China and visit some companies (some venture capital companies run by French professionals) to see how their work in Chinese market.
Regarding the current situation, everyone has had to adapt so quickly trying to provide the services in the best way possible. In this sense, emlyon business school has done really well. For the moment, I’m attending online courses with the same schedule I had before the confinement, doing face-to-face classes and group projects. We didn’t loose much time due to the fact that they organize a meeting with all the student of the Master on the first day of the lockdown explaining how everything would work in the coming weeks; so honestly, everything is very organized and clear.
So to conclude, I will strongly recommend to all of the students willing to complete an MSc in Finance to join emlyon, it’s a very dynamic, multicultural and talented program and they would really enjoy it as I do.
By Jordi Barbany Bofill class of 2019-2021
