My bhgap experience

[marcelmarius-blog]

Why  bhgap?

If you ever consider participating in the bhgap program, I can give you three main reasons why you definitely should go for it from a different point of view. Friendships. You will make unforgettable friends. You will meet people from all over the world who want to become entrepreneurs same as you, you will widen your network and profit from great people.

Cultural diversity. Students from over 13 countries made up our bhgap team this fall 2018. Japan, China, Germany, Denmark, Brazil, Mexico, Columbia, Austria, Spain, Thailand among others. This diversity boosts your personality.

Memories. I travelled to many different places, experienced many sport events, enjoyed many parties, had awesome lectures and met wonderful people. You will only get it here, in Berkeley.

[marcelmarius-blog]

Exceptional mindset

You have the perfect business idea. You work on it, elaborate on your business model and build the first prototype. Before you found your own company, you want to test your product by asking others and talking with potential customers. What do you do? You probably will end up keeping the idea for yourself and risk entering the market without the opinion and advice of others.

Why? Because you are afraid somebody will steal your idea or even embarrass you. That’s how a business idea ends. Well, not in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley could be defined as the place where you share as much information as you can because everybody out here will not think about how to steal your idea, but rather how to help you best. They want to enhance every idea and they do not care if it is not their own.

This still fascinates me. This really makes Silicon Valley a different place. Helping each other out, being open-minded and staying optimistic are key characteristics of the Berkeley experience. See it yourself.

[marcelmarius-blog]

Game Day

Soccer? Handball? Maybe in Europe. But not here in California. The most favored and hyped team sport in the US is, as everybody knows, Football. In the beginning, it was kind of weird for me to see everybody chatting about football instead of soccer. But I quickly realized, football is the thing to go. Berkeley has its own football team and celebrates approximately ten games during the semester, called game days.

The highlight is not the game itself, but rather the atmosphere within and before the game. Thousands of students meet up at different fraternities before the game and celebrate together for at least three hours. Loud music, happy students and the perfect mood. When the game starts, all students go to the game and continue partying over there, making the game an unforgettable experience.

It does not really matter if Berkeley’s team wins, what matters is the fact that everybody has fun. The game day experience is one of the most thrilling things I experienced.

[marcelmarius-blog]

Company visits at BHGAP

My favorite aspect about the Berkeley Haas Global Access Program are the company visits. The main intention of those is to present us Silicon Valley’s way of life regarding business culture. Therefore, we are visiting several companies every Friday within the first weeks. There is a lot to learn about Silicon Valley, the high-tech start-ups, their unique working culture and their story and mission.

To only mention a few of the companies we visited, we have already been to Mozilla Firefox (picture), Salesforce, LimeBike, BootUp, Spotify, Google, Orange (picture), Ripple and Oracle. The special and essential feature of our company visits are the different sizes of the companies, ranging from a small young stage start-up to a multibillion known company. It is very interesting to see the big differences between the working culture, decision making and management.

If you want to learn about Silicon Valley, you can not miss to experience different companies. With the Berkeley Haas Global Access Program you will be sure to visit the hottest companies. 

[marcelmarius-blog]

Haas and it‘s unique style of education

When deciding about where to study in the US, I considered excellence, reputation and proximity to entrepreneurship. After a ton of research I believed that the Haas School of Business at the University of California in Berkeley, surrounded by countless start-ups in Silicon Valley, was the right choice. After several weeks spending at Haas I can already confirm that this was the best decision I could ever make. 

There is one aspect that distinguishes Haas from different business schools. No other business school has such great, well-experienced, interactive and passionate professors. Professors at Haas embody all Haas’ defining principles that are questioning the status quo, being confident without attitude, being a student always and being beyond themselves. They make the Haas experience so exceptional. The way they teach, the way they share experience and the way they show interest in students contribute to the unique style of education. 

Getting the opportunity to learn from world’s best professors is due to the Berkeley Haas Global Access Program. The BHGAP provides many benefits besides class for international students. Listening to astonishing speeches at cohort lunches is just one of them.