Hi there,
As I already mentioned in a previous post, I went to Spain with a rather wrong idea of what the country really is. It all started when I was in Caracas working at the Spanish Embassy (another mistake in life) and my boyfriend at that time told me to go to Spain to do a master’s degree since there were many possibilities for professional growth.
I arrived at ESIC, and everything was “wonderful”. A master’s degree that was going to prepare us almost to be CEO of any company and to top it all off, they gave me a 10% discount!
It all seemed too good to be true.
In the class we were 18 people, of whom only 2 or 3 spoke English. Here things were already strange because if you leave there to be CEO of a company, any CEO must speak English perfectly, right?
In the master’s degree you had to do group activities to solve cases. The logical thing was to arrive at the meeting with the case read and half answered to take advantage of the time discussing the answers, deciding, and writing. I mean, be productive.
But no, the only “abnormal” who came to the team meeting prepared was me. Therefore, having done what I had to out of respect for the time of others, I had to wait for people to read the case for the first time and for their brains to begin to react. Thus, an activity that should have taken you an hour at most, ended up costing 4 or 5.
The most absurd thing is that I was the weird one because I worked as I should. In fact, a colleague told me “That I had to understand what Spain was like and that in Spain no one was going to read the case before the meeting.” I told this partner that in “a normal country” the group would have arrived with their homework done out of respect for the others.
If I had done something like that when I was at university in Caracas, I would have been left without classmates and without friends for the rest of my degree.
Since I was the only one who arrived with the homework done, and no one had anything to discuss or contribute, the work ended up being just what I had done.
As for internships, another mockery.
Since you must complete 6 months of internship in a company, I began to do interviews. They interviewed me at a start-up called Efimarket and it turns out that they paid 100 euros a month for internships. This is because they were “good people”, and they covered your displacements.
I accepted it because I didn’t want to finish the master’s degree and still have the internship pending (something that happened to a lot of people) and because the company was relatively close to me. From the first day, they gave me a list of supposed SEO positioning that I had to do, and I say “supposed” because those people had no idea of what marketing is.
The funny thing is that the director of the internship department told me that she never understood how I, with such a good curriculum and so many languages, had ended up with such a bad internship. That those kind of internships were for people with less level. In other words, ESIC did not make sure that all its internships were good and that everyone learned equally.
Thus, the master’s degree so far was comprised of mediocre classes, group work with useless colleagues (without the possibility of doing it alone) and very poor company internships.
When I was in the middle of my master’s degree, my mother died, so logically I was absent for a few weeks from company internships, classes, and the final master’s project.
What came next, I never would have imagined.
I was “fired” from the internship for not going that couple of weeks, even though I had warned them. The truth is that this was a relief because the company was pathetic.
In the master’s degree they were already threatening me that I was not going to graduate because I already “had missed many classes.” When there were people missing a lot more without excuse. But of course, those were Spanish, and the parents were friends of the ESIC teachers.
With the master’s final project, it was the worst since one of the classmates, Lluís Alabau, started bullying me because “I wasn’t working hard enough”. When I was the one who had worked the most in the group.
When I couldn’t take it anymore, I complained to the director of the master’s degree and asked them to let me do a project by myself since I couldn’t handle the harassment I was suffering. In other words, I didn’t even mind starting a project from scratch by myself as long as I didn’t have to bear the harassment from this colleague anymore.
What was the response of the master’s director? “That since I was a foreigner, I didn’t understand the tone with which this colleague spoke to me and that’s why I took it badly, because Latin Americans are very sensitive” he told me to be smart and to take advantage of that project since it was half done.
So, I had to continue enduring that nightmare until the end of the master’s degree.
Another of the most absurd things is that there was a case pending in which I did not intend to do anything because I had already done the work for everybody throughout the year. The logical thing is that once I wasn’t going to participate, they shut up and finished the work. It was not like that, one of the colleagues who was always an hour late and who did nothing all year, dedicated herself to sending me messages to convey her discontent at my “lack of commitment.” Really?
The ESIC master’s degree is summarized in:
- If you paid, you don’t even need to read the work material if you are Spanish. If you are a foreigner, stick to what you get because no matter what happens to you, you will never be right and you will always be less than others.
- Mediocre job market that will not take you anywhere, only to have the most mediocre companies enslave you for a few months.
- Mediocre teachers who have no humanity, no empathy, no vocation.
- Majority of students who did nothing in a whole year and still graduated.
- 10,000 euros thrown away.
Another funny thing is that I was still registered in the ESIC’s job market. Just for being since it is something that I had paid for.
From said job market I received the most absurd and incoherent calls. It seems that the most mediocre companies in Spain are the ones that put the offers on the ESIC website.
One day it turned out that they had unsubscribed me because according to them “a CEO had told them that I had not gone to the interview and had not notified them” Thus, without notifying me, they unsubscribed me from the platform.
Jorge Cachinero Escudero, who at that time was director of professional development, responded with an immense lack of education, telling me that they were not going to do anything and that I should find myself how to sign up again on the platform.
I had to report them to the consumer office so that they would sign me up again and to send me a letter apologizing and promising not to sign me out again. Jorge Cachinero himself was the one who sent the letter apologizing.
The people I have talked to about ESIC are not at all surprised, they say they have never heard anything good. Everyone says, “We already know what master’s degrees and education are like in Spain.”