The classes are much more interactive and the teachers are trying to engage with all the different students and they are trying to give everyone regarding on their backgrounds their own space and time to answer questions and also to give their input from their own background. There is not so much frontal teaching as we call it back home but we have a lot of case studies to read, and this is the foundation for work in the classroom and the teachers are just building on that and interacting with the students very much.
Before I came here, I didn't know how diverse it would be so what primarily draw me here was simply the fact that I knew there would be a lot of case studies and a lot of practical work. And I could see form the CVs from all the professors that they all had practical experiences and they are just practitioners, they are not from the academic background. And I also really wanted to learn how business is done in Japan. And I think this is best done by case studies. And since I came here I learned so much about how Japanese companies are working and how as a foreigner you should maybe be careful about certain things that you do or you would expect coming from somewhere else.
My most favourite class would be behavioural finance with professor Iwasawa. He comes from Nomura, he is a practitioner I think this topic is to him personally very interesting that he is teaching, the behavioural aspects of finance and maybe how people are doing some errors that could be avoided and you really feel how he is very immersed in this topic and that he has a lot of fun teaching mostly to foreigners this topic.
In my opinion the biggest difference is definitely the diversity at the school. Especially in the student body, I don't only mean by the student body coming from different cultures and nations of course there are students from all over the place there are different Europeans, there is North Americans, Latin Americans from Brazil, from Mexico, there is African, there is Asians of course but not only Japanese but Chinese, Taiwanese, Indonesians and there is just a very interesting mix for me to study in. Also I would say that the teachers themselves they are also coming from so many backgrounds there are teachers coming from securities, there is teachers coming from energy policy making, lawyers and this is for me was a very interesting experience to come here.