The trigger

For me, the most difficult part of my plan to become an international top executive was undoubtedly to attend a short course abroad.

Actually, I had attended a 10-day seminar at Harvard Extension School in June 2004, as an optional extra of the local MBA I was attending at that time. The problem was that all the people who went to that seminar were from the same country, so it's easy to conclude that it was not a multicultural experience. However I had the opportunity to visit Boston and Harvard University itself though we didn't have many opportunities to find out about applying to Harvard because of our schedule (we were in class from 9 to 6).

So I realized I had to get another short course. So I started to look for that type of courses in 2005, mainly at Fundacion Carolina. This is a Spanish institution which provides courses (most of them with almost-full scholarships) for Latin American people. If you want to know more about this the website is http://www.fundacioncarolina.es/. Unfortunately I couldn't get any of the courses at that time. In 2006 I tried again and I also tried to apply for a short course at Maastricht School of Management (MSM), in the Netherlands, a well-renowned school for giving students from developing countries the opportunity to update their knowledge in a multicultural academic environment.

I applied to MSM and I get accepted, so I took the 12-week Diploma in Financial Management. As I told Mr. Dorus Evekink, Director of the program, all we students received three benefits from that invaluable experience:

1. The opportunity to improve our academic skills,
2. The opportunity to know people (now friends) and cultures from all over the world, and
3. The chance to visit beautiful places in not only Holland but also other European countries.

I really got the most of that experience, I would strongly recommend you MSM as a Business School where you can learn from those three aspects while studying a short course. Besides, Holland is a beautiful country. By the way, if you're interested their web page is http://www.msm.nl/. Well, I should stop this now because I could write an entire blog only about the MSM experience. Anyway, I learnt that I also could be a strong student attending classed, making presentations, discussing cases and leading some tasks all in English.

In summary, the MSM experience made more confident in my ability to study and work in a multicultural environment and this also made me think: the time has come, now I have to start applying for a top international MBA.