BME Presessional video part 1 transcript

Title: BME Presessional 2009
Duration: 13.41 minutes

187 students, 18 nationalities. Here BME students talk frankly and honestly, about their experiences on the course.

Expectations

Amiran Tsertsvadze (Georgia): When the course was underway I found it extremely useful and I gained not only English language support, but business English support and it’s working well so far.

Chen-Chi Yang (Taiwan): This course is better, in that it’s more professional than I thought.  It’s much more English and Business based including for example the presentation, the writing skills, the project and the case study.  It’s really professional,  more professional then I expected.

Maria Cristina Baggio (Brazil): And when I arrived here, I didn’t have really good expectations. The course was much better than I could imagine.

Yaser Al-Jammaz (Saudi Arabia): I now know a lot of things about the British style of studying and Education, so, when  I came here, when I started the Pressessional course,  it’s really given me a thorough realisation of how it looks like during the EPA and what kind of things I have to do….

Challenges

Chang Xu (China): I think the most challenging part here is to exchange… to exchange your views and ideas with friends from different countries with different cultural backgrounds.

Maria-Luisa Argiolas (Italy): Time management was quite challenging and also budgeting, because I had never studied business before so for me it was a completely new experience,  but it thought was good support, gave me a good start because I could start studying something about business, marketing and research and that could be really helpful for in a Masters.

Yi-Chen Su (Taiwan): I’m poor at reading and writing so …the course about projects took me a lot of time to read and write and to reach  ….about 3000 words, so  it’s really very challenging… but at the end we all passed so I think, it’s worth it.”

Zahra Sazegarnejad (Iran): The case study (element),  it’s a very nice part of this, I’ve never  seen it before or heard about it before, and everybody can  do it.  I think I love this, this … part of course because I can think about everything …”

What is unique about the BME?

Sophia Butt, Programme Director: The Business Management English Pressesional is an intensive programme that has been devised to suit the needs of students intending to study on a range of degree programmes at the Birmingham Business School. Its curriculum contains materials that are business related and so, when the students study reading, writing, listening or speaking, they will focus on materials which have a business theme.”

Wataru Hamada (Japan): It isn’t just intensive,  I mean it’s not just hard also it was fun, yeah. I enjoyed a time a time in class where me met other classmates, I made friends with  classmates from other countries, yeah it was fun.

Davit Khutsishivili (Georgia): To compare with our countries, on this course, teachers like to work individually with persons not only in a group but also individually, yeah so it’s a new experience for me. Because mainly in our country we work as a big group and there is not so much attention on the individual person, so this is new for me.

Amiran Tsertsvadse (Georgia): Here we found that this is not IELTS, the BME course is totally different. People here care about your future career and future course, they are prepared.  So I think that this course is extremely useful, for everyone not only people who have some problems with English.

Andre Andika Nitimihardja (Indonesia): Here in the BME they tell me about how to write a proper essay  with proper structure of academic skill. So it will be very helpful for me in my future course to write an assignment. This is my first time that I came to the UK. So I have to settle and adjust with the culture. The BME also helped me to adapt and adjust into the situation so it’s very helpful for me.

Jimena Gomez Lues (Chile): Here you don’t learn English exactly, you learn how to establish English, it’s different because you learn how to make a presentation, how to write something in English so … when you study English, you study and learn new language and here you learn how to do it in English.

Nada Rangsikansong (Thailand): In the two years before I come into UK, mostly the course that I had done were tutorials about…into IELTS tests which I  think most of us have been familiar with. The difference with this type of course is that before they tended to only tell you how to get a good score in Academic English …. So I think the BME course really gets us prepared for a Masters course and to actually use it not just how to score well in the test.

Preeyaporn Somboonwana (Thailiand): I think it’s totally different, because we didn’t study just grammar but we studied the business theories. It was new for me, I’m not familiar with them, and I think its also really useful for us  in the future. Every Wednesday we have a lecture and in different sessions there are different things, so I can know what exactly I want to learn from business. Do I really want to study marketing, or finance or HR or anything else.  After 10 weeks I think,  I totally had no idea about other things so maybe I can think about marketing first, so I can ….embrace this knowledge or experience before I start my MSc Marketing.

Yi-Chien Tsai (Taiwan)

10-week BME Student- MSc Strategic Marketing: In Taiwan teachers always just speak and we just sit down to receive the knowledge. But here our teachers always encourage us because they always give you a question and wait for us to respond. I think it’s really good because it’s really stimulating and it’s also to make sure you do something right.  Not just in the lecture, if you really learn something .., you can have a response from the teacher and they encourage us to discuss it with colleagues and also with teachers. I think it’s quite different here than to Taiwan so I like it here.

New academic skills required

Rama Sulemiman (Syria): I’ve got lots of benefits because during my studies at home I didn’t do any essays or any presentations so when I did it here on the BME course it was my first time to know how to do this  and start doing essays and doing presentations which I think will save some time for me during my Masters degree here especially referencing and the  Harvard system.

Geoff Cockayne, BME Senior Project Coordinator: I think its not sufficient for students to simply regurgitate to you. No!  To copy information from various sources, especially these days from the internet because to do that without saying where you got that information from is fundamentally dishonest.  And in order to be honest as well as to show that you are actually able to present your materials yourself, in order to avoid being accused of being dishonest.  We use the term plagiarism for that where you copy information from sources and don’t say where you got it from.  It’s essential that students learn how to use the referencing and citation system which is common throughout universities. There are different systems used. We tend to use the Harvard system on the BME, but it’s essential that students make themselves familiar with those referencing systems and that they actually apply them but most of all its essential that they realise that most of all its not acceptable to copy and paste information from the internet and that if you do that you're likely to have a serious problem.

Amiran Tsertsvadse (Georgia): The course was full of academic skills, really full especially the 6-week  because, because 6 weeks is not too much time.  I would say writing, case study problem solving, the presentation skills.. I would always be in guest lectures. We were like normal Masters students….

Chen-Chi Yang (Taiwan): I would say the first one is the presentation skills, and I haven’t spoken… presented in English before.  Especially because my tutor asked me to read a case study in class, and maybe later we need to present in the class, so this is quite new and it’s kind of exciting for me as that’s the first thing I learnt and then also the project things, they’re really challenging and it’s given me lots of idea about what’s real, and how a project should be, so it’s really helpful a lot for that.  I think these are the two things that I learnt most from this course.

Maria-Luisa Argiolas (Italy): I learnt quite a lot about presentation skills… it’s very useful in business especially in business life.

Megren Al-Otaibi (Saudi Arabia): Writing skills, seminars, presentation and  reading, reading skills, journals how to read news papers, magazines.

Nada Rangsikansong (Thailand)

6-week BME student- MSc International Development: All of us would have some basic ideas about it, but because we have stopped at school for a while so we tend to forget about it. BME helps out with that kind of skill and it’s very useful to learn especially the citation skills which we are going to use all through the year.

Yaser Al-Jammaz (Saudi Arabia): I would say the most important thing that I could think of is my confidence with English. Now I can visit my work,  I can read, whichever, I can make an assignment, assigned to me, and also I can Read, I can speak, I can write, and  I can listen to lectures, because also that you have a lecture each week  from the Birmingham Business School… I think this information is really useful and for the confidence in my English was really important.