Letter of advice to next year's students

Another item that has been recommended to post on your blog is a letter of advice to the new students, the people that will start next year. I think this is a good tool for reflecting the semester that has just passed and think about your progress. Therefore, you can find this letter below. (For more information, check http://www.rug.nl/Studiekiezers/_shared/pdf/InternationalBusinessAndManagement.pdf)

Assessment Report Leatty Shanghai

In the 'Word it out' post below, I have already showed you the most important words that I have used in my assessment report for Leatty Shanghai. However, you haven't even seen this report! I handed it in last week, so I can post it online now.

I think I wrote quite a nice report here. I have been looking closely at all the comments I got on my last report and I have tried to follow the guidelines on Nestor (our digital learning environment) as well as possible. We will probably receive our feedback (and grade!) somewhere this week. I am looking forward to that and I will post it as soon as I receive it.

Word it out!

Through another blog (http://ilsevanoutersterp.wordpress.com/) I just found out that you can generate nice visuals of your texts. On the website worditout.com, you can paste your text into a field, which will then generate a word cloud, an illustration of the most important words in your text. The most frequent words are the biggest ones on the picture. It is a nice way of summarizing your reports and assignments!

I have tested it myself, by pasting my assessment report for the Leatty Shanghai construction project (which I will post here soon) into the field. The result is shown below, isn't it wonderful? :)

Presentation feedback

First of all, I wish my blog readers all the best for 2012! I am honored that people from The Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Russia, India, Australia, Malaysia, Brazil, South Africa and the United States have visited my blog over the past few months. I hope you all have a splendid year (better late than never, I guess)!

Secondly, just before the Christmas holidays, we presented our recommendations for the German car manufacturer Erstaunliche Autos. I presented this case with Sören before (see below) and this time I perfected it together with Marijn (http://marijnsettels.wordpress.com/). This presentation went very well, I think we did a good job in explaining our measures to rejuvenate the company.

Feedback on press release

I received Ms McKinney's (our English teacher) feedback on the press release I wrote about two weeks ago. You can find this text three posts down on this blog. The feedback was very positive; according to Ms McKinney the text was well constructed, especially the last paragraph containing the 'boilerplate'. There were some minor issues, though.

Lessons from a presentation

Today, Sören [http://learn-academic-english.blogspot.com/] and I held a presentation on a major cost-cutting package to help a car manufacturing company to improve their results. We were the financial consultants of Tompkins and Kosters and we had to devise a plan to rejuvenate their company. To come up with a decent plan, we held a meeting beforehand. In this meeting, we discussed the options we had to cut costs within the company and how they could increase their sales. I learned some very valuable lessons from this presentation, and especially from the feedback we got on it.

1. Don't use the phrase "Second of all, ...". "First of all, ..." exists, but after using this phrase, you have to use "Secondly", "Thirdly", et cetera. I made that mistake along with some of my classmates;
2. Be specific about your plans;
3. Prepare yourself for specific questions on your plans and how you want to execute them;
4. Make sure that the graphs you use in your presentation have a clear legend and that measurements are clearly specified; 
5. Be careful with using capitals in your presentation.

It is very important that I keep these lessons in mind. I will do the graded pair presentations in week 51 with Marijn and it will be about Erstaunliche Autos again. We can improve the rejuvenation package for this presentation and I can keep all this feedback in mind to ensure that I receive a high grade for it. 

You can find the presentation below: 

Presentation EA (Version 2.0)

Language Learning History

Today, one of my classmates attended me to the fact that I had not submitted my Language Learning History on my blog yet. I had a look and I found out that I had completely forgotten to add this important feature to this blog!

The Language Learning History, or LLH, is a summary about how you came in contact with the English language. It focuses on your first experiences with English, how your language skills improved over the years and what you want to achieve in the years coming.

I hope you will enjoy reading it and if you have any comments, you know where the button is. :)

21!

For our English course, we were asked to step into the shoes of the board of directors of a cosmetics company called Hazel. We were asked to launch a new product, design a new logo, design a new advertisement, and to formulate a new mission statement. For the launch of the new product, it was required to make a press statement and hand it in so that it could be checked for errors. The press release is depicted below.

Results!

Two weeks ago, we had to hand in the Stitch Wear memo report. In the same period, we had exam weeks as well. I've got the results back now and with a 8.1 on the memo report and a 9.1 on the exam, I can be very satisfied.

Memo Report Stitch Wear

After the comments I received on the Konopnicka Airport memo report, I wanted to make the next report better. The report did not have great coherence, neither did it have perfectly built up sentences. Besides this, I did not use a variety of language forms, to make the text pleasant to read.

I hope the Stitch Wear memo report (below) will be better structured and I look forward to the results. If you have any comments or tips, please leave me a message.

Vocabulary profiler

There is a tool with which you can calculate how many academic words are written in a text. It calculates the number of families of words and also how many of these families are Anglo-Sax originated and from Greek or Latin origin. You can find this tool on http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/.

Memo Report Konopnicka Airport

Together with Laurence and Marijn I negotiated with Hedde, Jana and Jasperabout the expansion of Konopnicka Airport, a case in 'Market Leader', the study book we use for English I. The negotiation was very interesting, both the parties tried to get the most out of it. We represented the Polish Ministry of Infrastructure and Polish Airports whilst Hedde's team represented the building company Laumann and the bank Weber-Merkel. After all, I think we made a very good deal. The most important aspects of the deal were the interest rates on the loan and we think we negotiated this very well. Here follows the memo report of the negotiation:

Presentation feedback

On September 22nd I presented an article called 'Power up your Power Point presentations' by Karen Friedman [http://ezinearticles.com/?Power-Up-Your-Power-Point-Presentations&id=1819529].

I thought that the presentation went quite well. I was nervous when I stood in front of the class, but my classmates said it didn't show. I wrote the following summary about the feedback I got in class:

Learning goals

As a start, I will tell you about my learning goals for this year first.

As I already mentioned, I spent a lot of time oversees. This has made my English speaking and writing skills sufficient for understanding and speaking English at school. However, I would like to improve my skills in academic writing and speaking. I think I am already quite confident in that, but there is always room for improvement.

Besides that, and what I think is the most important aspect of academic English, I would like to learn how to structure an academic text. Structuring a text is very important in academic English as it determines whether the reader will fully understand your text or not. I am not sure if I possess those skills yet.

If you have any tips on how I can improve these skills, please leave a message. :)

Welcome!

Welcome everybody, to my brand new blog!

I am writing this blog for the course English I for IB&M to keep track of my performances and progress in this subject.

First I am going to introduce myself. My name is Peter Jesse Sijbrandij, I am 21 years old and I live in Groningen, The Netherlands. This is also where my current study is. I study IB&M, short for International Business and Management, at the Rijksuniversiteit. That is a three-year Bachelor program after which I will probably enroll in a one-year Master program.

I am originally from a small town called Hidaard, which is near Sneek in Friesland. After my secondary school I chose to go travelling with a friend of mine. We set off for Australia, thinking about staying there for eight months. It did not really go according to plan, though; my friend left after eight months and I decided to stay for longer, a year and a half to be exact. After that I travelled through parts of Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, China, Tibet, Nepal and Sri Lanka) and Africa (Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa).

Travelling rewarded me with a lot of unforgettable experiences and gave me a good insight in the real world beyond Holland's boundaries. I would do it all over again, if I stood for the same decision again. I also gained good English speaking and writing skills and working experience. In Australia I had to work for my money, it runs out really quick, which gave me a lot of confidence in English speaking and expanded my vocabulary greatly.

As I mentioned already, I am currently enrolled in a study, called IB&M. Next to that I work in a cheese factory in Friesland to keep funds up a little, mostly in the weekend. Living costs are high in Holland, if you have to pay for everything yourself. Mommy does not cook for me anymore now!

I hope you will enjoy reading this blog and learn from it yourself as well. If you have any comments or questions, please write me a mail.

Peter Jesse