We started the day by visiting the Wargaming headquarters. As an avid gamer, I was beyond ecstatic to learn more their corporate culture and game development process.

One thing that the Head of Human Resources said that struck out to me was how Wargaming emphasizes “work-life harmony” and exposure to company culture and values. This philosophy was reinforced by their enumeration of the resources the company provides and social engagements/clubs it organized. For example, all employees at Wargaming have access to the gym regardless of whether they work virtually, hybrid, or in person. As one would imagine this increases an employees stake in the company and motivates them to do more for its success. Prior to this experience, I would have never considered work as an aspect of life which needs to be placed in harmony not separated. 

After Wargaming, we returned to the University of Nicosia (UNIC) where we had multiple opportunities to work with UNIC students and develop our teamwork and collaboration skills. It was fascinating hearing about all of the students’ journeys and their opinions on Cyprus. The students we worked with were from Greece, Russia, and Kazakhstan and were a mixture of business and engineering students. The most interesting activity we worked on was building the tallest tower out of spaghetti, tape, and a marshmallow. While the building process was fun, I felt that the discussion at times was lopsided with us not directly interacting with the UNIC students and involving them. This was a shame, because for most of the UNIC students, this was their first time doing this activity, while we had been doing it since kindergarten. It would have been an interesting learning experience for them to have taken the lead and for us to have guided them. This would have taught them about how to approach this activity, and it would have been an exercise for us in clear communication. Through this experience, I realized that I wanted to work on facilitating open discourse where everyone feels welcome to share their ideas.