Participants Comments | Internship Reports

Report on Internship and SOM courses. Summer 2000

Vyacheslav Shoptenko

For me participation in the PIME program started from the first class taught by Dr. Mark Perry in IABB in October 1999 and culminated in summer 2000 visit to SOM UMF for classes and internship.

I can say, I feel that after participation in this project my level of skills and knowledge made a drastic jump ahead from the point I used to be formerly.
Thanks to the organizers' efforts in all program activities I could advance myself in large number of aspects:

1. Skills and knowledge related to my core area of studies with aid of totally 9 courses from Core Business Management Curriculum both adapted to teaching in IABB very intensively and in "original version" during summer semester in UMF.

2. Understanding of Academic area and educational system in United States (due to participation in summer visit, discussions of curriculums of IABB and UMF and their integration opportunities, interaction with UMF faculty).

3. Understanding of U.S. corporate and public style of work by means of internship and number of meetings with different people that represented both public and business sectors. Professional skills achieved by means of this as well.

4. Appearance of circle of people that benefit from our communication and can exchange the knowledge and experience they have.

5. Last but not least - I got to know American culture (which is totally different from European and Russian) by means of spending nearly 6 weeks in U.S. and seeing and "feeling" it myself. And I would say this experience is as important as the one described above. It also helped to look on our problems and common things here from the new standpoint and look for solutions with better effectiveness.
I already have a lot of opportunities of applying what I have achieved due to this program in the whole number of areas both in IABB and outside it - in projects, educational process, jobs. With the skills and knowledge I got I will be able to benefit the continuation of this collaborative activities (between IABB and UMF and other possible participants) which are very important for further development of American-Russian cross-cultural communication and I hope some day I even will be able to benefit the whole our society by means of implementing everything I know now and will learn further.

I'm glad that after long process of intensive discussions and negotiation cooperatively IABB and UMF were able to modify slightly the initial agreements and make all activities the most suitable for everyone related or participating.

As a summary of this "evaluation", I would grade the achievement of this program as A+ or "excellent".

I hope, IABB will be able to continue similar activities in the future, especially taking into account experience and base or background that was elaborated during last two years of PIME activities, because we all understand how useful and beneficial is this for everyone related to this kind of programs.