International Research Project 2017

With my four fellow committee members, I was responsible for organising the whole trip. After some discussions we finally decided to pick Brazil as our destination. After the promotion for the project, the team finally as complete, with 20 persons in total!

After the team was complete, we faced our real challenge: acquisition! From January we started calling numerous companies, in order to find four companies who would like us to do research for in Brazil. Before we flew to Brazil, we had a month of desk research here, in The Netherlands. In May we worked very hard on the four projects in Brazil. During these two weeks we worked really hard during the week days, but the weekends consisted out of a lot of fun activities, nice dinners and a lot of parties. For example, we reunited in Rio de Janeiro, where we visited some of the best clubs of Brazil and had a very nice boat trip. In Sao Paulo we visited the office of EY, where they prepared an interesting presentation about the Olympic games in Brazil. We ended up in a very nice bar in the city center of Sao Paulo, were we had a lot of caipirinhas and practiced some salsa.

In Brazil each team worked individually. We had very cool partners attached to the IRP 2017, including a big international Dutch bank. One team did their research in Rio de Janeiro and two teams had Sao Paulo as their base camp. My team did their research in a small village close to Sao Paulo. In the second week me and my team had to fly to another partner of our company almost every day. It was very nice to experience the real business life for a week!

After two weeks the official part of the IRP came to an end, with some of us already flying back to The Netherlands. The rest of us enjoyed the culture of Brazil for a little longer and visited the most beautiful islands and cities.

But not only the time in Brazil makes the international research project so good. We learned a lot from this experience, starting with sales, during a sales training at EY from Sales & Pepper. In March we went to Bain & Company where we learned how to deal with a consultancy project and how to start such a project. On top of that we had the guidance of top consultants of BCG who were always willing to provide us with advice.

To conclude, it was an unforgettable experience and I would like to encourage everyone to apply for the IRP 2018!

On behalf of the IRP committee.

Yours sincerely,

Kirsten den Boer
President 
International Research Project committee 2017