Martin Lacka - my whole story

Everybody knows cliche „never say never“. I have experienced this recently when I applied for Master's degree programme Project Innovation Management at UCT Prague. As a student finishing another Master's degree programme at UCT I was thrilled by the opportunity to develop my knowledge in a different field than chemistry.

My and my classmates' experience with the new programme are affected with COVID-19 pandemic because the classes had to be taken online. It shall be appreciated that the risk of online classes had been taken into consideration before the semester started and so we had a chance to meet with our classmates in person on „adaptation day“. This helped to match faces with the names during MS Teams online lectures. Also, I should mention that I was surprised by the diversity of classmates. There are not only people studying other programme on UCT like me but also already working people, and students from foreign countries. Every subject has also English version so Czech students can meet foreign classmates and vice versa. Our instructors introduced themselves on „adaptation day“ so we know who is hiding behind weekly MS Teams presentations which is double important.

At the moment the study is online but at least from my point of view I can say that everyone tries to make it as smooth running as possible. I was pleasantly surprised by larger amount of team projects which is not that common anywhere at UCT. Such team projects can have a form of case studies or semester projects. At least some form of student cooperation is included in almost every subject which is helpful to fulfil our socialization needs. For example, I can mention the subject Project Management, where our team had opportunity to create social media profiles mainly for the Economic programmes at School of Business UCT. Overall, I think everyone imagined studying this semester in a different way.

I have to say that getting out of comfort zone and deciding to apply for Project Innovation Management studies was one of the best decisions I made last year.