In October 2007 I applied to a master's course, Communication and Public Relation in Business, in Bucharest, at the ASE (Academia de Studii Economice). The condition for admission was a university degree.It is a two-year program, the study method is very interesting, a special form of distance learning, classes are off-campus, everything is "on-line". There is a special web-page created for us by the University, where we registered and logged in at the beginning of the courses. Each Monday our professors posted on the site the new topics, homework, questions, polls, projects and we had a deadline to read, learn, do and send back the homework and projects. There were forum topics and chats launched, where we could write our opinion about the topics and we could read others' opinion as well and could reply to them. The teachers gave us a feed-back after reading our answers. Everything was happening in a virtual world, we could enter the site any time we had free time, but we had to respect the deadlines and the requirements. The condition for entering the exams was to had activity on the forums, to do all the homework and projects for the deadline and to had certain amount of points/marks for these activities. The only occasion we could meet each other and the professors were the exams, as they were held in Bucharest.
We studied PR, communication, psychology, negotiation, e-marketing, deontology, human behavior, IT. We had a lot of projects to do, some were individual but there was a team-project, too.
As we didn't know each other only virtually, by reading each others' answers or interventions on the forums and seeing a small photo and a name next to the answers this team-project was the most interesting and challenging task. I was so lucky to be part of a great group, with 6 girls: Raluca, Gabi, Iza, Corina, Cristina and myself. Iza was so inspired to invite all of us in the group, choosing us after she was looking at our activity during the semester. (Very clever idea!) And she was right as all of us are hard working girls and active all the time, posting all the answers and homework in time. So we formed a wonderful team, even if we didn't know each other in real life. We had a project about how to develop the Romanian Black-Sea tourism. After a month of planned and organized work we finalized the project, but meanwhile we became very good friends. We did such a great job in communication and negotiation during these weeks that our professor was very pleased with our team-work.We were anxious to see each other and decided to meet at the exams. To recognize each other easier we decided to wear red tops. Our live meeting was wonderful, we forgot all the stress of the exams and spent memorable moments together, finally, in the real world.
