Class Description
The Global Course I took was BUS ADM 5797 Study at a Foreign Institution. In spring of 2020 I attended Bocconi University located in the heart of Milan, Italy. Bocconi is one of the top Business schools in Europe, with their facilities and instruction quality reflected this. While at Bocconi I focused on courses in Fashion Entrepreneurship, Digital Marketing, Fashion Retail and Cinema. My classes were extremely immersive and captivating, taught by professors renowned in their fields. I was in Italy from early January until mid-March due to the COVID-19 pandemic causing for me to come home early. However, classes were transitioned online seamlessly and I finished out the semester in early June. These classes were structured to be as immersive as possible and the transition to online classes proved to be just as effective. I learned a lot in my courses and I will take what I have learned with me into my future with marketing.
Class Reflection
I was very apprehensive at the begging of my courses because of fear of being able to adjust to the classes. However, I realized not after long that they would not be as daunting as I had feared.
My Digital Marketing course was a great step into learning all the behind the scenes that happens with Marketing Analytics. For the course, we worked with a local Italian business specializing in personalized protein and health snacks. Every week we worked on a simulation in order to predict market trends and campaign strategies. This helped me understand SEOs, earned and paid media and many more metrics pertaining to marketing. At the end of the course we presented our growth strategy to the employer and got their feedback. This hands-on experience was perfect for gaining experience as I can now confidently say I’d feel comfortable working with Digital Marketing projects in the future.
While at Bocconi I also took two fashion related courses. One of them being Fashion Retail Management. This course was an excellent choice to take as I had some prior knowledge to fashion retail structure from taking courses at Ohio State beforehand. My professor was highly involved in Milan’s fashion scene and we even got to visit some of Milan’s fashion museums. We were able to see fashion week with our own eyes which was such an experience in itself. In this class we learned about different brands and whether they could be considered luxury, prestige, heritage or mass. All of the content was very interesting and involved as we were studying in one of the fashion capitals of the world. Truly a once in a lifetime experience.
The other fashion related class that I took was Entrepreneurship in the Fashion Industry and was probably one of the most involved classes I’ve ever taken. Our goal was to create a brand and use a simulation to predict what would happen as we launched our line in different countries and through different channels. The winner with the best idea would get funding from our sponsors to start this company which was a huge deal. While my team unfortunately did not win this challenge, the knowledge I got from this class was worth it. We had to make executive decisions every week and it was great getting to work with students from all over the world.
Lastly, the class that I guess I took for “fun” was Critical Arts and Cinema. I had pretty low expectations for this class but it turned out to be one of my favorites. Each class we would watch a famous movie and then tie it to some sort of philosophical theory. I love classes that make you think and I love movies so it was a perfect fit for me. I remember one week we watched The Terminator but then ties it to Marxist Theory, so it was definitely an interesting class to say the least. For our final paper we had to write a detailed synopsis of a music video of our choosing, I really enjoyed the creative freedom we had.