Frog to Dragon: HEC MBA & Tsinghua MBA Blog
The quest for wisdom, from France to China, of an HEC MBA & Tsinghua MBA dual degree student (class of 2011)
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So here I am. I came back home to Paris a couple of hours ago after a 7 weeks holiday trip which brought me to China, Japan and Tahiti. And last week, while in Tahiti, I learned I have been accepted to the TEC On-Campus Program that I had applied to early this month. Everything’s good :)
Tags: Assignments, Travels On Monday I received my room contract from HEC. So I’ve been officially attributed a room at the Expansiel residence on the HEC campus! Yay! One of my future classmates posted a link on the Facebook group to a few photos that a previous student took of the on-campus rooms a couple of years ago. Check this out: Photo 1, Photo 2, Photo 3. That reminds me of the dorms I used to live in when I first left Tahiti to study for Prépa…
Tags: Life on campus, Logistics I’ve finally finished (and sent) the essays for the TEC On-Campus Program.
Tags: Assignments, TEC On Tuesday, during a trip to Kyoto, I was visiting around with some friends and as we grew tired of walking, we started to look for a café to sit down and relax for a bit. The café we found by the imperial palace was like nothing we’d seen before.  Inside the imperial palace At first, we didn’t understand how to behave at the Free Café Harimaya Station. It seemed like just any self-service café in Japan, only with the exception of cashiers. Indeed coffee, tea, juice and even rice crackers were completely free of charge. This concept, we later found, had been developed by a successful confectionery company to “give back” to society and promote traditional food, in their case rice crackers (senbei), and environmental awareness. The café wasn’t a place of only benevolent goodness as a small shop counter was conveniently located a few meters from the free café. By instituting this free café, Harimaya Honten managed to attract people, make them feel good, and even buy their product and offset their running costs! Their philosophy also caught my attention as they were careful of making rice crackers in traditional, and more environmentaly-friendly, as opposed to sterile industrial ways. Pictures of their factories showed them more like Japanese country houses with beautiful gardens than the typical concrete blocks. Since I’ve visited this café I can’t help but think of how this new model for marketing a quality products could be applicable in other circumstances. Could this café exist in Western countries or in any place outside of Japan?
Tags: Travels |