From Munich to Berkeley for BHGAP

The first few weeks at UC Berkeley have been transformative indeed. I met my amazing fellow BHGAPers, visited San Francisco for the first time with them, and celebrated Chinese New Year together. This celebration is a big deal in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the high population of Chinese immigrants here.

Contemplating Classes

Over the past few days, I was busy finalizing my class schedule. Berkeley, or Cal as it's often called, offers a huge variety of interesting classes. It was a tough choice! My BHGAP courses are:

• Fundamentals of Design Thinking
• Innovation Strategies for Emerging Technologies
• High-Technology Marketing Management
• Decision Making
• FinTech

In addition, I’m taking one course from the main UC Berkeley course catalog, Navigating Life’s Financial Decisions. However, the class I was looking forward to the most was Introduction to Chocolate (a student-run course through an organization called DeCal) all about chocolate 🙂. Unfortunately, my application was denied because too many students were interested in taking this course, but life moves on I guess…

Gaining Insight From Experts

The Berkeley Haas Global Access Program not only gives you the opportunity to study at one of the best business schools in the U.S., but it also allows you to explore all that UC Berkeley and the Bay Area has to offer, from student clubs to speaker series and company visits. Speaking of company visits, our first visit this semester was to Berkeley SkyDeck. BHGAP allows you to visit so many companies around the Bay Area. The most interesting company so far has been DocuSign, which provides electronic signature technology and digital transaction management services.

The Classroom Experience: Germany vs. UC Berkeley

So far, I’ve been truly enjoying all of my BHGAP courses. I did notice a huge difference between the way courses are taught here at Cal and the way courses are taught at my home university. At TU Munich, class sizes tend to be bigger, which makes it more difficult to allow deep dive discussions and interactions with the professors. The BHGAP classes are much smaller with around 20–30 students per class. I appreciate how we’re able to receive much more individualized attention this way and get more chances to talk to our professors. Also, the class and case discussions are the most valuable part of the Berkeley Haas learning experience because they stimulate analytical and creative thinking. I still remember our BHGAP co-director Alex Budak encouraged us to act like a peer in the classroom, not like a consumer. Being a peer means co-producing learning instead of merely consuming it! 

Last week, we had a guest lecture on Artificial Intelligence by Matthew Stepka, who is an Executive-in-Residence Visiting Scholar at Berkeley Haas. The four insights from his talk were: AI is:

• real now
• teaching computers rather than programming
• not magic
• a mirror to humanity

Thank you so much for reading! Until next time!

GO BEARS!