Semester 2 is finished- Dissertation workshop

Hi guys, second semester has finished! We are on Easter holidays now, then its exams and then dissertation. The year has gone way too quick! I don't want it to end =( I'm going to miss the time at university and the time spent with the friends that I made at university...well not that I won't be seeing them after University. (I used that sad baby picture because it describes how I feel. lol)

Last week we had a dissertation workshop and most of it was a waste of time. We have three choices for the dissertation, we either have to write about our own business idea, do our dissertation on a startup's idea or with a big company's project.

On Monday we went to Google campus to do our BFP presentation. We had to present the problem our business idea aims to solve, our solution,  3 important issues for our business and the 3 minimum features that will cover those issues. As well as the presentation we had to present our MVP made from Wordpress.

I must give myself some credit for doing the presentation slides lol because they look really good. Simple and sweet lol. Basically my style is no words just pictures to represent what is going to be said. I just don't like seeing too many texts on slides, it's very distracting. In fact I learnt this technique from last year finance classes. Itxaso said investors don't like seeing slides with too much texts. The slides have to be kept simple, clear and concise. Benjamin was the one who presented so credits to him for presenting so well and being able to understand my slides lol.

My colleague Bryan did an awesome job on the MVP. The demo page looked amazing, so much better than I expected. To be honest, I didn't think he was able to produce something like that, lol =p. You must be curious, go check it out here.

At the end of our presentation, Itxaso and Magdalena (our mentor) didn't have any questions for us. Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing. However, Itxaso did have a big smile on her face and said that our video is really good. Awesome! (The video is an explanatory video of iEducase which I blogged about in my previous post but I've included it at the end of this blog).

On Tuesday, Dave our lecturer invited two people in to talk about dissertation. Sorry not invite... he paid them to come in. We did some silly activities like writing down our feelings about the dissertation on post-it notes.. I only stayed for an hour because I wasn't feeling well but it was boring and waste of time anyways. Seriously, Dave wasted his money.

On Wednesday, Chris' workshop was to help us find and define our research question and areas. It was sort of helpful but I wasn't able to think of my research question.

On Thursday, we had to form study groups of 5 and discuss our research area. A few sponsor companies came in to give a short presentation of their company. I wasn't interested in any of them. This day however was useful because my path is clearer, I am thinking of doing my dissertation based on the beauty industry. Lol. Might as well do something you're passionate about, right?

Source from kweekweek.com

On Friday, we had an unconference. This took place at KweekWeek's office that's near Angel station. (KweekWeek is a startup, it suggests events to people according to their tastes and location. Something like that lol)

I don't know why we went there, the initial venue was one of the lecture theater at Uni. It would have been better at Uni as it was so cold there and we could have used the toilets freely and unlimited times without getting dirty looks. Basically, when my friend and I asked the founder of Kweek Week if we could use the toilet, she was reluctant to let us use it. She said 'no not really, but yeh go on.' She knew we were there from 1pm- 6pm. Either she was expecting all of us to be holding it in for 5 hours or she was expecting us to walk down  to the McDonald's that was 2 minutes away or to the pub that was also 2 minutes away.  At the end of the day, Dave introduced her to us as the host of the "event", she was a total different person. Nicer one that is. Lol. She had a lovely smile on the face when she spoke. You thinking what I'm thinking?

Later on we met our dissertation mentor and they were all interesting and really experienced business people. After the mentors introduced themselves, there was a mini networking session with the mentors as we get to choose the mentors. Everyone was fighting to get the best one lol.

Anyways, that is it for now. Thanks for reading and catch ya later!