It’s raining. I’m sitting in my room looking out the window and down on one of the buildings in the yard a couple of storeys below. The church bells have stopped ringing, and the only sound left is the dripping of rain and the splashing of water from the drainpipes. Maybe St. Gallen hasn’t really awoken yet or maybe this is just the ordinary silence of Sunday mornings.
Exactly a week ago, around this time last Sunday, I met up with a group of other CEMS people waiting for the bus to Filzbach. We were going on a 6 day seminar as a part of the CEMS programme. The bus took off from the main station in St. Gallen heading in the direction of our first destination, the Hydropower plant near Lake Garichte.
The subject of the seminar was sustainability and corporate strategy, with primary focus on the future energy and climate challenges. This is somewhat outside my field of expertise. The programme for the week was ambitious, consisting of a combination of company visits, lectures with leading professors within the field of sustainability from different European universities, company presentations by Shell, Vestas and Novo Nordisk, break-out sessions, and group presentations. The seminar was run on a tight schedule with activities from 9 o’clock in the morning often ending late in the evening with dinners with corporate partners, which of course saw this as an opportunity to get in contact with potential new employees. It was 6 very intense days, getting to know new and interesting people and definitely a lot of food-for-thought.
The setting in Filzbach was amazing. For pictures please visit the website of Lihn where we stayed. The hotel was set on the side of a mountain looking down over the valley with the clear blue Lake Wallensee in the bottom encircled by the surrounding mountains. This place created a calm and almost tranquil mood with its clear view to the distant peaks in the west and thick layers of fog filling the valley in the early mornings, and thus creating a splendid offset for the day to come. It was as if nature had crept in under the floorboards and created the perfect framework for the seminar especially with its subject on environmental issues.
The subject on sustainability was very new to most of us. One of the wonders of the CEMS framework, the diversity across theoretical, practical and cultural backgrounds, really surfaced during this seminar. Sustainability has many components. Putting it simple it is the corporate challenge of balancing economical, environmental and social impact of your operations on the company’s physical and social surroundings. Of course this has many aspects. The primary focus of the seminar was that of environmental impacts on the climate with focus on the world production and consumption of energy. The diverse backgrounds amongst us - the participants - gave the seminar an edge, which, adding to the contributions from the competent lecturers and company representatives, both expanded my horizon greatly and made me realise the actual complexity and the real challenges this subject contains.
I think it was Thursday – right around the time where I was starting to catch a cold – we ran out of the somewhat standardised subjects of “Where do you come from?” and “Why did you choose to come to St. Gallen?” and the togetherness really began to emerge. With the many different origins and cultural backgrounds (from Sao Paulo to Russia and Italy to Norway) there were lots of interesting things to talk about – and so we did. I think most of us got a pretty good idea of each other. For me as a newcomer this was especially great.
With a short detour into Austria to see one of the largest producers of gondolas in the world (Doppelmayr), we headed back to St. Gallen Friday afternoon, just in time to have ice cream on the shore of Lake Constance (Bodensee) in the town of Rorshach. I was pretty beaten when I arrived back in the apartment around 19.30. It had been a long week, and I had been sneezing my way all afternoon. I should probably have stayed at home in stead of going out Friday evening.
All in all – the seminar proved a great way to begin the stay here in St. Gallen. Meeting people and getting the opportunity to flex the academic muscles – a warm up for the semester to come.
My calendar is lying open on the table besides the laptop. The language courses start next week together with a range of social events coordinated by the university buddy initiative. More new and interesting people to meet and the opportunity to really test my high-school German. It has stopped raining now. I have a “learning experience paper” to write. Should probably start reflecting a bit more on the seminar.
