How the hell did we get here?

Somehow our class has converged on Lyon…

From Brazil, or Russia, the US, South Africa, or Germany, or China…or any of the diverse, far-flung places that we’ve all emerged from and left behind… somehow we all decided to do the same thing. We all bought tickets for planes, or trains, or packed up our German cars (and Paulauskas probably swam across the Baltic Sea) to make our journeys to the exact same destination: Lyon.

Why did we do this? Maybe some of us were browsing through the FT rankings and saw something they’d never heard of before…maybe some of us were sick of our jobs in cushy offices and wanted to do something a little different and a little crazy…maybe some of us believed that ‘entrepreneurship’ could actually be taught, and figured that this year we might finally develop the guts to put up our house for a bank loan…or maybe some of us just like to be perennial students and couldn’t resist the allure of getting another Masters degree… I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter. Regardless of our motivations or reasoning, somehow all 59 of us decided to travel to a French city named Lyon to take part in this bizarre ride…this incredible, life-changing social experiment. The GEP.  

  

A lot has happened since we all arrived together in September—all excited, eager and wide-eyed like little fat children in a candy shop. We’ve met a lot of people, had some good nights, done a lot of travelling, and we even learnt some stuff… a bit about entrepreneurship, but A LOT about each other. It’s been beautiful. Really. Thank you all for making this experience amazing for me so far. Now it’s almost December and we’ve seen our first snow together (please follow YouTube link to see Afolabi get a snowball to the face)! Our journey in Europe is coming to a climactic close, and in just a few weeks we’ll be in China—wide-eyed, eager and hungry once again. This pivotal year in our lives is going to be so amazing and intense... It’s hard to believe that our journey is just getting started. It’s only been 3 months together and I feel like we’ve already been through so much…

It’s pretty weird. Rarely in your life do you get to connect with people so quickly and so deeply. Everyone in our course has already made life-long friends, even business partners, and maybe even potential soul mates to love delicately and grow old with (this one goes out to you Kian)… It’s pretty crazy. I think admissions picked us well. We’re a group that’s incredibly diverse, but at the same time we’re all very similar kinds of people… we are the compulsive movers and travelers and experimenters, the dreamers and inventors and risk-takers, we’re the people who enjoy being lost and out of our comfort zone, babbling in a strange foreign language, we’re the ‘crazy-ones’ that our friends talk about back home and wonder what the hell they are up to, we are the freaks that can never stop changing and learning and giving and taking and creating and dancing and shucking and jiving. We are the global entrepreneurs.

Thank you GEP and all you lovely GEPers for rocking my world. Welcome to your blog.       

-Sebastian Martin