TacoCat’s Travels #58 (Paris): It's the Final Countdown! 👩‍🎓

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Hey Steemit!

So if you didn't catch the last few posts, this series is about our trip to Paris way back in June 2016 when we went there for summer school! Both of us enrolled in a Luxury Management course at a college called HEC Paris. The course itself was 2 weeks long, but we booked our flight a week earlier so we could travel and explore the city.

In the last post, we explored the Palace of Versailles! It was super cool seeing the inside of the Palace; where the royals lived hundreds of years ago. And the Italian style architecture was amazingly detailed and designed. Even though I had no idea what I was looking at when we were there 4 years ago, it's nice to learn now looking back at all these pictures.

20-24 June 2016.

Anyway, this post will be kind of a short one. After that weekend, we had to endure another week of classes for our summer school course. Which involved a 3 hour lecture in the morning, a break for lunch, and another 3 hour lecture in the afternoon. Our course was only 2 weeks long, so the second week was pretty tight; with us scrambling to complete our presentation and assignment in time. Meaning any free time we had during the week days was spent in group meetings and discussions, unfortunately. But that's pretty standard for college classes.

Luckily for us, we had our secret kitchen (which I wrote about a few posts ago). But just to recap, Sean and I were staying in the same room which also happened to be just beside our friend's room. So we used Sean's vacant room, which was on the top floor (in a building with no elevators) as a secret kitchen! The 3 of us would hang out in the evenings, cooking dinner and chatting/complaining about our group mates. 😅

We even shared macaroons!

It was fun hanging out, just the 3 of us, in our secret room. I don't think anyone else knew we were cooking in there. And we could just be our Singaporean selves. 😆

We'd cook all sorts of stuff too. But mainly pasta with canned soup and some vegetables with processed meat, like sausages and crab sticks. It was simple but it was actually really good!

We did celebrate the last day we cooked together though.

It was a stressful few days, especially since I took on the task of designing the slide deck for my group. But eventually, we came to our final day in HEC Paris! The whole day was basically just watching team presentations, and guess what. Of course my team was to go first. The professor went down the list according to alphabetical order, and the first luxury brand was my group's - Aston Martin.

Just to refresh, our group project was to choose a luxury brand and propose an omni-channel strategy for them to create a seamless customer experience between physical stores and e-commerce.

My group decided it was better that we went first, just to get it over with quickly. I mean we didn't really have a choice but still. I was super nervous at the time, but I'm glad we went first, just so I could debut the slick introduction video I made:

Sorry the beginning got cut I did the best I could.

I know it doesn't look like much, but I worked hard on the rest of the slide deck as well; putting in a lot of animations, sourcing the right shade of silver for the background, and the actual Aston Martin font. I'm just glad that during the actual presentation the slides worked perfectly. Although I do admit, I did kinda botch the conclusion of the presentation. But I think my slides definitely saved the day, because we ended up winning!

That's right; my group ended up winning Best Final Project! I was so surprised and happy! My group mates attributed it to my slide design, but I said it was a team effort. I appreciated their compliments though. 😄

To this day I think I'm most proud of that presentation. Not only did I complete the slide design in just a few days, but I had to study the material (something that was completely foreign to me) in a week, and I was in a class full of Masters' students. Even though in the end the grade didn't really matter since my home college would just count it as a Pass, I was really proud of that achievement.

Sean's and Ho Kit's presentations were pretty alright too. But even they agreed that I put in the most work for the slides of all the groups. I didn't want to toot my own horn, but it did seem obvious that some groups just didn't really care. I mean it was just a 2 week summer school course, so I get it. It probably didn't make sense that I put in so much work, but I actually enjoyed it. And I'm kind of a perfectionist myself, so I couldn't help it. I just can't submit subpar work.

But anyway, after all the presentations were done, we took a hecc of a lot of photos!

Don't mind that nobody's looking except me; there were a lot of cameras around.

Unfortunately, I can't remember any of these people's names at this point. I think even then I probably didn't know everyone's names.

It was really fun working with my team mates. They were actually really nice people! And they were pretty smart too! It did baffle me that they were so amazed with my powerpoint skills though, but hey, at least I impressed some people. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And of course, I made sure to get a nice photo of the 3 of us:

After taking a crap ton of photos, we pretty much headed back to our rooms to change. My feet were killing me at that point in those crappy heels. We chilled for a little bit, then wound down the night by checking out the school bar and having a beer!

We returned to our room soon after that to pack up and stuff. The next day we would be heading off to our Airbnb that we booked for a few more days before flying home! But more on that next time!

Sorry this post isn't much. I wasn't sure if I wanted to tag on the next day too, but I think it'll be too long if I do that since we did explore a whole other area in the city as well. But here's a sneak peak:

We got to enjoy this amazing view! Where? Find out next time! Well I guess you can figure it out by google search but yeah.

Thanks for reading!

To find out more about me, check out my intro post here!

Check out my previous post in this series!

TacoCat’s Travels #57 (Paris): Wandering through the Palace of Versailles! 🏰

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