STUDY TOUR COURSE

In this post, I am going to tell you about our Study Tour course and what I learned about it. If you want to read about the trip you find the post here.

In our first year first semester, we started to plan our Study Tour. At the beginning of the course, we first had to present our ideas for the trip. All the teams got to choose from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, or Iceland. My group chose Denmark, and we planned a five-day trip to Copenhagen. We also could apply for the Project Manager position, and we had to go through an interview. I applied for the position, but this time I wasn't chosen.

We all had to sell our idea for our class. Then we vote on which of the destinations we wanted to go to. It wasn't a big surprise that Iceland won. All of us chose which team we would like to work in. The teams were the arrangement team, marketing and communication team, safety team, program team, and budgeting & sponsors team. I chose to volunteer as a team leader for the budgeting team.

Our main responsibility was to calculate and update our budget. We applied for travel support and searched for sponsors. We also collected money from our classmates.

Our group started to plan what we needed to do. We had our progress report in our classes' SharePoint, so everyone knew what we needed to do and in what stage our plans were going. We asked our tutors about money collecting. We wanted to know which banks they had used and if our school had a bank account that we could use. We searched different banks and what sort of accounts they could offer us. We also started to search for sponsors and grants we could apply for.

When we started to realize how much money our trip to Iceland would take, we had a vote with our class about changing our destination. So, after the vote, there were more votes for changing the destination. We had another vote on the destination and this time Norway won. All the teams had to start from the beginning and keep working harder because the time was closing in. So, we started to calculate everything again and collected the needed information from the other teams. We also changed the sponsorship search for marketing and communication, because they had already found a sponsor for us.

After the arrangement team had everything booked, we calculated and collected money from our classmates for our account. Then we started to fill out our travel support, but the next day we learned that our hotel had raised our price. We needed to update our travel support fast, and in the end, everybody got their support before the trip. Usually, it is done after the trip, but we wanted to have it before we left.

My responsibilities were to organize and see that everything was alright in our team. I also attended team leader meetings and worked with our project manager. I made the total budget for the Study Tour and updated it when something changed. I also searched how the travel support was done and collected all the needed information. I was also in the account team we founded with my classmates and worked as a vice holder of the account.​

---

MY GOALS & COMPETENCIES FOR THE STUDY TOUR

---

GOALS

My goal for the teamwork was to communicate with other members. This goal partly succeeded and partly did not. With my team, I had great communication during this course, but with my other classmates, I wished to have better communication. One surprise that I got from the peer assignment was that one of my team members wished to have more communication from me with the group while in Oslo. I did not realize this during the trip, because most of the time all of us were staying in our small groups and did not see each other except when we had company visits. So next time we go somewhere with my class, I wish we have more activities together.

---

My goal as the team leader was to learn more about team leading and becoming a good leader. I think I did a good job as the team leader. My team made my job very easy, everyone did their job well and on time. The only thing that I had trouble with was making sure that everyone had something to do. We really did not have that many jobs that one or two people could not handle, so it was sometimes hard to give tasks to everyone. Our communication during the planning was great, we had meetings when needed and I kept everyone organized on what they needed to do and what was going on. In the future, I want to be a project manager and challenge myself even more as becoming a good leader.

---

My goals for the budget were to make a cheap and reliable budget for the trip and to learn much as I can about budgeting. Before this course, I had never done any budgeting or anything relating to it. So, when I started as a team leader for the budgeting team I had no idea where to start or what to do. In the beginning, I had some problems figuring out what should we do, but we made it through and started to get information about the different choices we had. I also was founding our account team and I am a vice holder of our class account. We made a total budget for the trip and applied for travel support beforehand. Money collecting also went well and I learned quite a lot about the different steps when making a budget.

---

COMPETENCES

Customer understanding and service I developed in planning the trip and budget, understanding what other people want.

The ability to deliver sales presentations I developed when we at the beginning of the course had to sell our ideas for the trip to our classmates. We tried to sell our trip to Denmark. We made a schedule for every single day of the trip and searched different hostel choices, restaurants, company visits, etc.

Global mindset and cultural awareness I developed when searching for my own information about Norway and Oslo.

Professional communication (oral&written), I developed by emailing different people for example, when I asked different companies about visits and when we went to the bank to open our bank account.