All exchange courses are now over and somehow time seemed to pass by much faster in the second half of the semester compared to the first half. Earlier I completed four courses worth 3,5 ECTS each, and in the second half I did three courses. The workload and time spent with each of the courses in the latter part of the semester felt much greater, although it did not matter much because I personally was more interested in most of the topics in the second half anyway.
Corporate Social Responsibility - professor Joana Story
This course focused on the strategic side of CSR which was interesting as I have taken a CSR communication course before. CSR is a pretty debated topic and in this course it is covered from many different perspectives. Professor Story seems extremely passionate about CSR and gives entertaining, engaging lectures but she also expects class attendance and wants students to participate. The workload in this course is very doable although it did include quite an extensive quantitative research paper to do in a group. Structurally it is not a big work, but because it requires working with SPSS which none of our group members had done before it took some effort to complete. Apart from the group paper, the grade is made up of participation that includes in-class assignments, as well as an exam which is based much on class knowledge and class slides so if you have concentrated in class it is not difficult. Overall a quite entertaining and interesting course that I can recommend.
Customer Relationship Management - professor Elizabete Cardoso
This course was one of the most interesting ones to me before hand and it turned out to be a very useful, hands-on course which focused on how to manage CRM initiatives. As a case company we worked with Benfica, Lisbon's football team, to analyze their CRM activities and develop new initiatives. This was somewhat difficult at times as most of the information which is available on Benfica is in Portuguese. This course does not have mandatory lecture attendance, but surprisingly while lectures were scheduled for Wednesdays and Thursdays, we also had group presentations on three different Fridays. This required some rescheduling as exchange students tend to travel on weekends, but the professor was flexible and understanding with times. The grade consisted of three presentations, a final paper and a final exam. Preparing three different presentations took quite much time, but the final paper just included the presentations in a package and the final exam was based on both the group presentations and class slides so it was not too difficult. Overall a somewhat time consuming course, but an interesting topic, good professor and it provides valuable understanding for CRM so I would say it is worth it.
Global Human Resources Management - professor Rita Cunha
The GHRM course covered a lot of topic areas that I was familiar with from earlier studies in international business (Hofstede, expatriates, issues with female leaders etc.) which also made it harder to concentrate and keep an interest on the new things that were taught. Class attendance was not mandatory but there were several separate assignments to complete for the course - a personal essay, a group case study, two executive summaries in a group, a group term paper and presentation, as well as the final exam. Overall these assignments were not too demanding although organizing so many different group assignments took some time. The exam was based on a case which was a nice change and skimming slides was quite enough to study for it. Overall I did not get too much out of this course, partly because of my own interest level and quite low class attendance, however it was not too demanding and definitely an exchange student -friendly course.
A nice thing at Nova is that grades are supposed to be provided to students within a week of taking the final exam. So the final grades are now also in and it seems that as I passed everything, meaning that I am also done with all courses in the Master's degree. The only thing left to do after exchange is the thesis, although I wouldn't mind spending another sunny semester in Lisbon!
