Certificate Done

Well, it seems that my first year at the OU is done and if nothing went amazingly wrong then I should have my Certificate in Management in my pocket. Feels good. I wrote the test in Frankfurt yesterday which was a very interesting day anyway.

It started the night before when I read that TMF will start charging for their discussion boards. Roughly $30 per year. They will remove the ads and add several new features as well as develop new ones on request. I was wondering about weather I should do it or not but then decided to pay for it as I really met wonderful people and learned a great deal on the boards. And for what I have gotten out, $30 is nothing. But then, a mail arrived. :)

_Congratulations! You have been awarded a free one-year subscription to the Fool Community — no strings attached.[…]

This is our way of thanking you for being a valued contributor to the Fool Community in the past. _

Well that’s settled then. I will stay. The discussion is going on like crazy with the “Improve the Fool” board alone getting over 500 posts since yesterday morning.

Then I got up early yesterday and started my trip to Frankfurt. The trip was nice, filled with reading and trying to talk with a turkish guy to explain to him that the train will be late and that yes it is going to Frankfurt. He also told me something but I had no clue whatsoever what he was saying :)

I found the location of the test relatively fast but had over 1 hour to kill so I went into a small coffee shop and soon started talking to an elderly woman who was telling me everything about her studies (International Politics something) and that she got an electronic parking card now and is very proud of that. She told me everything about her choice of dress and he talks with the person from the university giving out the permits which did not seem to be easy mostly because he wanted to first give parking places to younger students. Weird. She also asked me dead about what I was studying and in retrospect I have to thank her a lot. First of all she gave me her luck for the day ;) But the bigger thing was that I explained to her what I am studying in a few examples and one of those was the gaps model of meeting customer expectations, or not meeting them. This was one of the questions in the test later on. It was really nice being distracted by her for the last hour and not going through all the papers again.

The test went very well but I am a bit worried that I wrote too much again. We will see, in two months when the grades come back.

I then met Marcus, whom I haven’t seen in a long time, and had a wonderful time talking about a million things and eating at an american sports bar. It’s amazing how much he can eat, really amazing. I still can’t get it into my head.

One of the most interesting things was probably sitting in the train and somehow starting off a very good conversation with somebody next to me and we talked for the entire train ride. He is Product Innovation Manager at Creon Lab Control. What a nice titel :) After talking over what I do, what I would like to do in the future, what he does, what the company does, neural networks, finding parts of molecules in huge test samples, aibo, computer gaming, artificial inteligence, … wonderful talk really. It has been amazing. He told me to come over some time to the company to take a closer look and I might just do that because it sounded very interesting.

So in short, read a lot of great things, finished a year of studies, wrote a good test, met an old friend, met two interesting people and found a new cool company to possibly work at. Wonderful day.