“Everybody can be great. I want you to be great, awesome, excellent.” These are the words of Thorsten Strauss, marketing director and one of the leading professors here at AMS. The main reason for opening this piece with it, is first of all, because it is true. We have all come here with a goal, we have all come here to achieve, and when professors address you in this way in classes, they make you feel that achieving is not something distant, something far away. They make you feel success is within your grasp. All you should do is want it, work hard for it and accept the guidance given by your peer students and mentors – easy, right?
Why I attach so much value to this quote?
Because the staff at AMS not only wants you to overachieve during classes, but also challenges you to be better than you think you are outside of them.
A good example is writing this article. Only three weeks ago, a call came upon the AMS-message board. The school was thinking about launching a platform upon which students could engage with each other and with a wider AMS-community – alumni, employers, professors. Even though the idea still was in its most premature phase, the school threw it at our feet, at its students feet. Are you willing? Can you make this? Can we do this together?
And so we are here. While you are reading this article, a dozen of students are writing and creating content. Three start-up entrepreneurs, alumni of the MIE program, are boosting this page’s technical functionalities and two AMS-staff members gather support for this project with their colleagues from teaching and administration – by the way: we are still looking for motivated students willing to contribute their own story to this platform.
Because, what is our goal?
Not to write silly pieces about how our latest group assignment went – yes, we are all over flooded with group assignments. Not to comment how our professors teach – no, their slides do not always answer to the strict standards of perfect slide design. And definitely not to criticize each other – ok, I know, we all have our flaws and bad moments and yes, we could write great articles about them.
But what is this about then?
This project is about you and your story. To give us all a voice. To let the outside world know why we are here and what we are doing here. What makes students of AMS so special and why should employers hire us? How are students of other programs experiencing their time in Antwerp and are there unknown (personal) stories worth discovering and learning about? This platform will differentiate on the bases of content, form and point of view with the goal of connecting our dots in a wider AMS-community.
It are these kinds of projects that add a little extra to a hard year of studying. It forces you to reflect on our learning experience, to work intensely in teams of students, in which everybody has its own ideas and its own desires. Also it forces you to plan, schedule and put in some extra hours – for example like me, getting up at 7 on a Sunday, which is tough. Yet, the joy of having written a piece as such by noon makes up for that. It is putting the motto of Antwerp Management School “open minds to impact the world” into action. And what better way to have impact than to share from experience and contribute with some reflection
Dear readers,
Together with the entire team behind this project, I want to thank you to take your time for engaging with us on this platform. We hope our stories will entertain, inform and inspire you to be great, to be awesome, to be excellent.
