David Gustafsson

Finally, only one week remains until the next semester begins. I have twisted feelings about it. It has been a long holiday so I am very inspired and full of motivation to take on new challenges. I really am. I have been missing the stress and excitement to learn and develop! Of course however a holiday is a holiday and if I had the chance I would have liked to continue doing nothing a few more weeks, but…

UNSW Logo

As a compromise between holiday and hard work the Australian autumn break (Swedish spring break) is soon to come. I would like to experience the Samoa Islands, New Zeeland or maybe the Great Barrier Reef once again (?).

For this semester I have only elective courses on my master in Quality and Operations Management. This means that I am free to choose courses on any topic within management or engineering (languages for example is not allowed). Since my last semester really was tough (at least to get out with top marks) I have tried to not go for courses with heavy workload. Although I would have liked to keep going with the web applications development track I have chosen not to since the first course had extremely high workload!

I will take a postgraduate computer network course that I feel is useful. Especially if I would end up at Ericsson this knowledge is crucial or at least a merit.

Together with computer networks, Strategy and Entrepreneurship is the course I look forward to the most. This course has been recommended to me by a few friends from the previous semester. It will go through all the stages that are required to become a successful entrepreneur including:

• Coming up with a good product and business model
• Learn how to attract good partners and funding
• Etc.

I have felt a need for this kind of course all the time since my failure with the EverTee startup.

Find a unique product that gives value to your customers! Make meaning.

Apart from these two courses I am not entirely sure about my last two courses. I would have preferred to take a more advanced course in Applied Marketing Research or in Operations Management/Six Sigma. However neither of these is offered at UNSW. I do believe that Chalmers has a competitive advantage at this area. I am enrolled to three courses from which I need to pick two.

• Negotiation Skills – I feel that this could be a very useful course for my personality and that I can get something out from it to use for life. If I like the teacher I will definitely go for it which makes this course my preferred course among my three candidates
• Management of Risk – This course is about how to handle risk while managing projects and goes deeper into the risk area than last semester’s course in project management. I feel that the area is very fuzzy but it could be good depending on the syllabus, teacher etc.
• Managing intangible resources – This is a course given by accounting. It partly brings up how to handle intangible resources on the balance sheet, which might be a little to detail for me. However this should not be the mayor part of the course and I do feel that the course can give me something as I am looking at a career within an IT organization or as a consultant. Again I will see how it feels after the first lecture!!

At the time of writing I have just posted my applications for summer work/internships. I find ABB, Volvo, Scania, Ericsson and Sandvik to be companies where I might continue after graduation. They have all received my CV. I have also applied to a few banks as I have never tried this sector. It is not uncommon that graduates from Industrial Engineering and Management end up in the banking industry and I am also very open for this. Finally I have also applied to a management consultant.

I am looking for a work task related to my studies. I would prefer something on quality and operations management such as a Six Sigma study or lean development within industry. I am also interested in something concerning stats and conduction of marketing research. Of course IT related tasks are also of interest, preferably together with the above mentioned. Hopefully I will get many interesting offers!

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