Imperial College London students project with blufVPN 🚀

Multiple voices, perspectives, and personalities bouncing off one another can give a lot of out-of-the-box ideas – and that is exactly what happened in eCartic office at the end of February!

60 MSc Students came to Tallinn as a part of the International Consulting project module, 5 of them were mentored by blufVPN team professionals.  

At the beginning of December, we got a pitch to be part of a business consulting project with Imperial College London on their International Consulting Project module. Where the MSc students work with a client to deliver an impactful business consulting project. The idea behind it was to send 60 MSc to Tallinn for a week and work with a local company. How could we say no? Firstly, an opportunity to work with young professionals from international backgrounds – imagine all the learning and innovative ideas! Secondly, an opportunity to support and mentor the students with our diverse knowledge. We, of course, said yes and we got to meet the five brilliant students – Hongyu (Kyle) Chen, Paloma Beer, Apurva Gupta, Emile Junet, and Halvard Ramstad.

The new reality of international projects – a mix of on-site and online teamwork.

With Covid-19 it has been difficult to arrange such projects, but thankfully, with proper preparation from both sides, we made sure the project could go ahead as necessary health and safety measures were taken. As we believe, nothing can compare to the true value of working together in person and bouncing ideas off each other – true brainstorming. But it would not be a 2022 start-up environment without someone joining in through Google Meets or Zoom call. So we made sure the students were well equipped with everything they needed. That included mentorship from our own Chief Analytics Officer, Micha Nyffeler. Mischa’s comments on the week with the students: 

“The week with the students from the Imperial College Business School was very fruitful and mutually beneficial. As a start-up, it gave us a lot of value to 5 students working at the office for 4 days as we created a framework for our Go to Market strategy and crunched tons of data on a large number of markets. 

The students were full of energy and worked very well as a team – there was a clear plan and tasks to divide and conquer and a healthy atmosphere where people could exchange, help, and also challenge each other”.

The result of a week’s work – a framework for an international Go to Market strategy.

Now that we have finished our business consulting journey with Paloma, Halvard, Emile, Apurva, and Kyle, we can honestly say, we can’t wait to do something like this again. Not only was it a pure joy to see the power of brainstorming and how they took on the challenge, but it also brought so much excitement to our team. We have all been at the beginning of our careers and know what it can feel like. Projects like these allow students to network and create valuable connections and gain hands-on experience in the real world. As Mischa mentioned, the amount of knowledge, information, and data they brought to the table is also very valuable to us. We can’t wait to update the students on how their work impacted blufVPN. 

Ecartic promotes diversity and equal opportunities and since 2022 is a part of Estonia’s Diversity Charter.

In 2022, eCartic became part of the Diversity Charter led by the Estonian Human Rights Organization. As part of the charter, we commit to promoting diversity and equal opportunities among our employees, partners, as well as clients. It has always been important to us that everyone feels welcomed at eCartic and we were glad that that is exactly the feedback we got from the students. Feeling welcomed, supported, and included! More to come this year about our work as part of the Diversity Charter.

Let’s work together on exciting projects!

Do you have an exciting project you want to tell us about? Are you a student looking for the perfect place for an internship? Get in contact and let’s see how we could work together!