"I was quite satisfied on the whole"

ELTE Business Economics Summer University was first organized last year. How successful do you think it was?
I was quite satisfied with it on the whole. The most important thing is, of course, that the students liked the courses. They also enjoyed one another’s company a lot, they went to lunch together and hanged out together after the classes. On the other hand, we did not have as many international students as we hoped for. That is partly due to the fact that we started the advertising too late, and, at any rate, this was the first year. There is no better advertisement than a satisfied student, and now we do have satisfied students. Also, fewer students participated in the social programs and the evening talks than we expected. That is probably because the residence hall is about 40 minutes from campus, and once the students returned to their rooms, they didn’t feel like coming back downtown again. Four 40-minute journeys are too much for a day. So we’ll have to schedule these programs for the early afternoon.

What else is going to change from last year?
First, the location. The Institute now has its own building, which is right next door to the campus; in fact, it can be entered only from the campus. It’s been reconstructed and it also has some nice seminar rooms. Second, we’ll have all the courses the same week. One reason for that is that now we three times as many students as last year, which means that the burden on the faculty members has increased, and we don’t want to make faculty members hang around for three weeks after a pretty demanding semester. And as I said, we have more rooms, which are fully equipped, whereas the rooms we can borrow from the Humanities School are not. 

And how about the courses to run? 
Three courses, which the students liked very much – Business Communication Skills, International Business Network and Managerial Accounting will be repeated from last year, with the same teachers. We’ll have a new course, Corporate Finance, which we expect to be very popular. Csilla Horváth from the University of Radboud will be teaching a somewhat more advanced course on Strategic Brand Management, and the director of the summer university will also be offering a course on informal logic designed for business students. Strictly speaking, that is not a business course, but why not give it a try?