The wait is finally over! After months of working, prepping and organizing, we are finally on the ground in the beautiful city of Istanbul, one day before the first of three weeks at our G-Lab host company. I can only reflect on the various milestones that got my team and I to this point:
Global Entrepreneurship Lab (G-Lab) is one of the flagship courses here at MIT Sloan and provides a unique opportunity to work for three weeks in a company in another country. The class itself is structured as a semester-long course, half of which is based on learning about entrepreneurship, opportunities and challenges in other countries; the other half is focused on researching details about the host client company’s specific job for the G-Lab team.
After an ‘outlier experience’ selection process, our team chose to work with a well-known, multi-national non-profit firm called Endeavor. Endeavor promotes high impact entrepreneurship in emerging markets and has an overarching mission to transform countries through sustainable economic development. We are working on an employee exchange program for the Endeavor Turkey office, as well as producing employee exchange program protocols for future exchange programs within the Endeavor Global network. While the project itself is more human resource management than traditional entrepreneurship, the opportunity to work with Endeavor has been remarkable and amazing.
One important aspect of the G-Lab experience is the G-Lab team you work with on your project and team dynamics. From as early as April, we selected who we wanted to work with (and travel) for our project. It has been tremendously fulfilling to learn about and interact with Anna, Barabara and Vivek in a way that you don’t ordinarily get to do in other classes or even socially in school. Having worked with them for more than a semester and travelled with them to Morocco for the past 10 days, I can say I am truly looking forward to living with them for the rest of the month – they are fun to travel with, highly opinionated (!) and a joy to be around.
So, check back for future updates on our working experience here in Istanbul and our travels around this amazing country called Turkey during January.
(image: www.ehlikeyfestaurant.com/history/history-of-istanbul.html)
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