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The Aalto University School of Business is a member of the Global Alliance in Management Education (CEMS), a community of the world’s leading business schools, large corporations and organisations. The community comprises 33 member universities and 74 international companies or organisations.

The Global Office of CEMS systematically collects students’ evaluations and comments about their CEMS MIM studies. The purpose of these evaluations is to serve as an internal tool for quality control and continuous improvement – and to energize the development work in the spirit of amicable internal competition.

CEMS schools have now received a message from the Global Office sharing the results from last spring and the academic year 2019–2020 as a whole. For the first time, CEMS also listed a five-year cumulative evaluation, and Aalto were ranked at second place in this! Only University of St.Gallen (HSG) got better evaluations.

‘Our fall term 2019 was challenging because of several ad hoc-arrangement due to illnesses, but the overall evaluation of academic year 2019-2020 was good due to three very high scores: services (thanks to Program Managers Arja Sahlberg and Liisa Kotilainen), Business Communications Skills (by Michael Baker with case UPM) and the Business Projects. Last spring, we had a record of 9 Business Projects with the following companies: KONE, Nokia, Hilti, H&M, ESA BIC and S-Group (HOK-Elanto). Our academic tutors did amazing work in supervising and supporting our student teams,’ says Rita Järventie-Thesleff, Academic Director of Aalto CEMS.

The business project is worth 15 ECTS credits. This spring, the students worked on eight challenging, interesting and strategic projects for five different companies. Each student worked on their project for up to 400 hours. Each project was led by two tutors, one from the commissioning company and one from the School of Business.

Rita Järventie-Thesleff wants to express her gratitude to the School of Business for the support they have received and to all Aalto colleagues who teach in the CEMS MIM. ‘Without our dedicated CEMS corporate partners and CEMS alumni, we would not be able to deliver on the promise of actively combining academic knowledge with real-life business experience. Last but not least, she is grateful to our CEMS students, who ‘create the environment they face’.’