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My thoughts on MEST and explaining “the dis tin”

Posted March 9th, 2010 By Guest Blogger  | 6 Comments

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MEST's First Graduating Class

“The dis tin,” or “the this thing”, is a phrase frequently used in Ghana to describe something that either is difficult to describe, does not have a name, or a name that the speaker has just momentary forgotten. (Disclaimer: Please forgive me, all Ghanaians if I am translating this somewhat incorrectly.)

In 2008, I worked at Meltwater Entrepreurial School of Technology (MEST) as a Teaching Fellow – more on that later. This past January I was fortunate enough to go back to Ghana and attend the graduation of the first class of trainees.

So what is “the dis tin” that is MEST? What does it mean to me, to the Meltwater Group, to our employees, and most importantly, to the trainees in the program? Since joining MEST as a Teaching Fellow in 2008, many people have asked me these questions.

MEST is Meltwater’s non-profit program launched in Accra, Ghana two years ago. MEST follows the Meltwater Group’s deeply rooted belief that “talent is talent everywhere” and that when “talented people receive the right amount of support, guidance and encouragement, they can accomplish extraordinary things” as our CEO Jorn Lyseggen once put it.

MEST’s mission is to train young Ghanaians in order to enable them to start their own globally successful software companies.

What did I work on at MEST?

A Teaching Fellow at MEST is a hybrid between a teaching assistant at university, a coach, a technology expert and a mentor … so pretty much a jack-of-all-trades ☺

In my time at MEST my main focus was…

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→ 6 Comments Category: Career Reflections

 

Your Academic Degree: Does it limit your opportunities in the job market?

Posted February 23rd, 2010 By Guest Blogger  | 2 Comments

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Meltwater employees are derived from a broad range of academic disciplines, including business administration, economics, cultural studies, journalism, law and even theology. In Germany this is very unusual, as it is common only to look for a job that relates to your education, just like it is standard for companies to only offer jobs to candidates with relevant educational backgrounds.

I studied Art History and after my master’s degree, I completed a PhD financed by a scholarship from the German Research Foundation. This educational focus reduced job opportunities rather than widened them. The only possible jobs I could find were within the cultural sector or at universities. Although I studied the arts, for family reasons I did not want to follow this academic career path – I wanted to make a change and start working in business. However, the possibilities to do so at the time seemed very limited in Germany.

What Meltwater offered me was further professional development, like a second education, and an opportunity to build the background that I was now interested in pursuing. The entry level Sales Consultant position is a training ground to build a foundation of business understanding and skills. I received a kind of crash course about the most important contexts of economic principles, including the answers to questions like: which internal structures do departments and subsidiaries of the biggest German companies have? What does a proper sales process look like - which aspects stimulate the negotiation process and which ones hinder the process? What is the…

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→ 2 Comments Category: Career Reflections