Course review

Hi guys!
What’s up? Hanh’s back everyone! How’s life in quarantine going? Hope that everyone is doing super well 😀

I figured that no one has ever described a course in detail ever before in a “non-course syllabus” way or depict how exciting a course can get in previous blogs. A thought flashed through my mind saying that why not try to create a course review just like a product or movie review, right? At the end of the day, many of us would be puzzling with a question: “Is this course worth the time to invest in?”. So, in today’s blog, I would like to share with you about my amazing and practical experience attending a project course at Hanken, namely Project Course in CSR and Humanitarian Logistics. This course is actually a compulsory for those who pursuing their Master Degree in International Strategy & Sustainability and Humanitarian Logistics program. However, this is open to other students in other faculties as well, if someone is eager to contribute to the good of society through a meaningful project. Stated a quote directly from the course syllabus, which I found quite true for myself:

“The aim of the course was to immerse the students in questions related to CSR by analysing and solving real-world problems provided by case organisations and then presenting the results in class. Among the cases were questions regarding the CSR of family-owned businesses, producing videos about sustainability and CSR and making guidelines about CSR for startup companies.”

There were 16 projects, with various participating companies ranging from UPM, Fazer, or even Hanken itself to MSF or UFF in total for this year. Each student is free to choose and apply for three projects in descending order of interest based on the informed project topic (Freedom of choice is always a smart strategy to execute, especially on students :D). According to the application preference of the candidate for the chosen projects, the organizational and academic mentors will pick out the most suitable candidate for the project. As a creativity and curiosity-driven type of person, the idea of designing a museum content about natural disaster for Heureka – a Finnish science museum immediately captured my attention and I decided to go for it.

Over the course of the project extending from the beginning of P3 to the end of P4 in Spring semester, I was assigned to a team of 4 and we worked closely with Heureka on the project. Briefly describing about my project, Heureka is planning to create an exhibition about natural disaster and resilience in which will be consisted of four experience rooms illustrating the effects of the disasters and 4 interaction rooms allowing the visitors to interact with the content embedded in the exhibit. In this stage of partnership, we were tasked to create research-supported ideas for the interaction rooms of the exhibit, each relating to one of four natural disasters which can either be floods, storms, bushfires or earthquake. Throughout our project, we were able to produce more than 20 in-depth ideas for the interaction rooms based on the theory of disaster relief operations and game design. It was incredibly fun brainstorming the ideas with the team and presenting them to Heureka museum designers 😀

Attached herewith are the footage of our meeting sessions at Heureka. Very informal and exciting atmosphere. Every time meeting with Heureka, we were filled with joy of exploring the museum.

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more exciting to hang out at the science museum as a course field trip??? At the end of the project, one of my teammates was highly inspired by the topic of the exhibition and is planning to cooperate with Heureka for his Master thesis. Heureka’s staffs are extremely intrigued by this idea, of course!

All in all, it was a super fun experience. Great teammates, interesting topic, and a great opportunity to networking and establishing professional contact to kickstart one’s career. What else can I for? Highly recommended for those who are hesitated or wondering if choosing this course is a wise decision!