The BEAM course’s trip to London

On the 8th of April, the BEAM course of the English Institute in Heidelberg and their teachers Mr. Haschler and Ms. Rose-Zimmermann, traveled to London by train. The full travel from Heidelberg’s main train station to the Hostel YHA Earl’s Court, where the group had breakfast every day, took about 12 hours.
The next day, the students visited Cambridge, stopping by two of its famous colleges: Peterhouse and King’s College. The students were warmly welcomed at the Fritzwilliam Museum by Andrés Gvirtz, a former Hölderlin student and an acquaintance of Mr. Haschler, who is now an assistant professor at King’s College. After the short introduction, the group went to the smallest and oldest college of Cambridge, the Peterhouse. The course was guided through Peterhouse’s courtyard, which is not allowed to be stepped on. Exceptions are seniors and professors. At around noon, the students pitched in front of Andrés and got feedback for their business ideas. After this short detour to the garden, they visited the next popular and royal college of Cambridge: King’s College. They had a walk around the college and also took a look at its big chapel which con-tains an exhibition with interesting historical facts about the chapel and college.
The day after, the BEAM course went to the headquarters of Hanson (now: Heidelberg Mate-rials UK), the leading supplier of heavy building materials to the construction industry. Em-ployees introduced their company to the students, telling them about what they do and what kind of projects they have done until then. Some of those turned out to be really successful, while some others were less profitable. After that, the students were given the opportunity to present their own business ideas again, gaining helpful feedback and critique. Additionally, Hanson workers toured the BEAM course around their company’s premise, including the building where some of the materials are made. For that, the students had to wear special clothes and helmets since a lot of dirt particles fly around there.
On April 11th, the BEAM students visited the SAP branch in Feltham. After arrival, they were welcomed with snacks and drinks and then introduced to the company by watching a short video clip. Afterwards, the course was led into the Immersive Experience Room that is used for visualization of the company’s work for their customers. The company develops reliable systems for automatization of different processes undertaken in businesses. Now, the group was toured around the SAP’s Experience Center. The students were shown live prototypes of their most recent products and how they are used in different areas of business like stocking and sourcing. One of these prototypes was an advanced headset provided with visual and recording abilities. Employee Jack Torrens then explained the difference between mainframe and cloud-based software. After that, he challenged the course, which was split into smaller groups, to convince him, as a hypothetical order client, to switch to a cloud-based software.
In the few hours before departure on the last day of the trip, the students had some free time, like every day after the group activities, to do last sightseeings and say goodbye to Lon-don.