Previous Experiences
Every year teams of students set out to perform research for companies in different destinations, last year these included Brasil, India, West-Africa and a few places within Europe. Below you can read some of the experiences the students had last year during the International Research Project.
Team Brasil
The sweet life of an IRP consultant; studying the Brazilian middle class and consumer behavior while sipping caipirinhas, and swimming in the ocean has been our life as business consultants for four weeks. Our way led us to the three major cities Sao Paulo, Brasília (capital), and Rio de Janeiro. Although we were well prepared to study the Brazilian consumer behavior, we had to deal with smaller or bigger problems of cockroaches and ant invasions, crazy traffic and the Portuguese language. Yet, we managed to meet business men, ambassadors, agencies and surveyed people on the streets long hours day after day. All of us not only gained more insights into business life, but also into the business life of a foreign culture. But how could we study the Brazilian middle class if we didn’t experience it ourselves? After all, the impressions that will remain will be the experiences of the most delicious caipirinhas, special foods, very friendly and happy people and stunning beaches like the Copacabana.
Team India
One of the most remarkable things of India is the amount of dogs living here. We believe that every person living in India owns at least one dog, which in total will sum up to a total of one billion dogs. One of the problems with these dogs is the fact they seem to run over the streets all the time, which makes it hard to drive around in a car. Another animal that is causing problems in traffic are the holy cows. Lying on the highway, sleeping in the middle of an intersection and making new cows at a roundabout isn’t that practical. Our personal driver is solving this with a separate horn only designed for animals and this excludes humans. Not only does the sound of this horn trigger a cow to move, it will cause the herd running their ass off. The funny thing about all these animals is that they are very rude and that for example the dogs do not hesitate to find sleeping place under your dinner table. You can now maybe imagine the roads a little bit, but we didn’t even described the traffic on top of these roads. Everything looks normal at first glance, but the ratio cars/motorbikes isn’t. When someone would look at the road they would guess every Indian has a motorbike, but when you see that most of the bikes are carrying 2 persons or more it is easy to conclude that there are a lot of Indian people. While we think it might be handy to wear a helmet to protect your head, most of the people here use it to protect their elbows. We already mentioned the special cow horn, but of course a normal horn is present in all of the cars. Unfortunately, everybody likes the sound of his own horn and they are using the horn at every opportunity. For example, a takeover, approaching a intersection, leaving a roundabout and of course when seeing a girl.
In summary, if you like the smell of a decent garbage dump besides the road, extremely spicy food, chaotic traffic and holy cows we can definitely recommend India. We only discussed the traffic here, but there are a lot of other experiences lying around here. Seriously, if you like an adventure, go to India.
Team Africa
After two and a half weeks, we are spending our last day in Accra, Ghana. It was the first time for the three of us in sub-Saharan Africa. As expected we needed some time to get used to everything. Although Accra is home to many expats, tourism is not well developed and thus ‘Obuasis’ (‘White’ in one of the Ghanaian dialects) are often an excitement for the locals. Luckily Accra is a very safe city and after getting used to the environment we really could enjoy our trip.
At the beginning of our first week we started to make appointments with companies, embassies, institutions and ministries. They shared their views with us about the transport infrastructure in Ghana and the future developments. The interviews turned out to be very insightful and enabled us to gather a lot of interesting information
During the weekends we had time to explore the country. Along the coastline, we visited a Dutch fortress that was used to deport slaves. Hearing the details about how the people were treated didn’t make us proud to be Dutch. We spent our second weekend in the inland where we discovered the beauty of Ghanaian nature. We visited several sights: the rain forest, a crater lake, the city of the Ashantis who are known for their gold reserves and the world’s largest artificial lake. We had a canopy walk in the rainforest and a tour along all kinds of trees that can be used for medical purposes. Did you know that some of the Ghanaian trees provide a Viagra-like medicine? We also had a private tour around the Akosombo dam that supplies most of Ghana and Togo with energy.
What’s still ahead of us? We will be spending the weekend in Nairobi, where we will meet Team ‘East Africa’. We’re sure that we will have a lot of fun sharing our experiences and stories and celebrating Martijn’s birthday. After that we will travel to Sierra Leone and Liberia for one week each. Let’s be curious what else we will experience…
Team Europa
Our company asked us to do the marketing research on Polish, Turkish, and British markets. Therefore, we had the chance to visit these three countries. It was absolutely a wonderful experience for us. During the time abroad, we had to work pretty hard for the project, despite the rain in Poland and the heat in Turkey. However, after finishing the work, we had a lot of fun travelling around, trying different foods and experiencing different cultures. We had the chance to talk to a few local people and some of them were really nice and helpful. There was one Polish guy who stayed with us for about 30 minutes just to help us get the right taxi. We were very impressed. The travelling part was definitely amazing. Besides that, we also gained practical consultancy experience by cooperating with the company, which would be very useful for our career in the future. We believe that IRP offered us the unique opportunity to combine fun and work. We really enjoyed it!
