Week #8, Prompted Post: Practicing your Knowledge, Junior Enterprise Experience

I always have been very interested when in doing the practicing of things and since I got in college has not been different.

In my first year of college in Brazil I was very excited and prepared to many opportunities. When you start in the university people are designated to show you all possibilities inside of the institution, and that is when the best experience of my life started. In one of the presentations that we were having, people from the Junior Enterprise that was located inside of the Business College came and presented the company for students and said that their selection process was going to start.

I was amazed by that idea of the junior movement, where students work in a company made of students and receive help from the professors of the college. This way I applied and was accepted, it  was a real company process we had interviews, group dynamics and also a trainee period, period when you develop a project during the first two months to show if you are able to work on the company or not.

This was a very huge hands-on experience because I was in a company that had the format of a real small company, with some directors,  two presidents and counselors. All the work that I developed during the whole year was very broad, I developed some internal projects that served to improve the internal operation of the organization and also the major projects that are external and deal with real clients.

For the major projects I worked in a business consulting for a Shoes company of the region, they needed a market research in a certain area of the city to see wether it was worth to open a new store in that area.

The project was realized by a manager and two consulters, and I was one of them. Together with my partners we did meetings with the client, listened their problem and guilted a plan for the consulting. The foundation for this project was the questionaries that we applied with more than 400 people over that specific area, for more than a week. This was a hard job, but very interesting because we could listened to people's reaction and analyze how they refer to the market. After this collection of data we had to analyze all the data and develop a big report that was going to be the final product for the client.

The report was a professional one that followed many rules from our company and many patterns. Beside the report we also delivered a presentation for all the director of the Shoes Company explaining our results and what was the final response about having a market or not

The experience when it comes to hands-on was amazing because it gave me a professional base since the first semester of university. But the personal experience that I had inside of the company was much more impressive, I related with people that I became my friends out side of the company, I also improved many aspect of my personality and of my life.

All the students that are part of a Junior Enterprise are differentiated, because they are working with things that you will learn just later in college and they create a strong base for when it comes the time to have this inside of classroom. After the 3 first months I could already see the difference inside of the classroom, other students were not worried with nothing not even the class and not they life, about adding experience out of the classroom. And I was already working in many projects, working with many people and also handling school well.