Waking up today, I was somewhat intimidated by the schedule. The itinerary took up an entire page compared to the typical third of a page of so, so I buckled up for a busy day. 

Our first stop, was the Wargaming headquarters in Nicosia. This building was absolutely ginormous, and really showed off the success of the company compared to the other offices in Nicosia. Our tour began in the basement, where there was a spa and gym that was free for all employees. They referenced a “work-life harmony” rather than a “work-life balance,” indicating the importance of integrating the two, which I thought was really cool. Some companies in the US will offer gym memberships, but I thought the idea of incorporating the gym into the building increased the effectiveness through ease of access, which is something I would love to see more of back home. 

After brief o overview of the company, we got to better understand the business model of the company and how they go about developing and maintaining an active user base for their most popular games. Their most popular, and one of the oldest games Wargaming has developed – World of Tanks – is a realistic MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) that pits teams of some of history’s most famous tanks against each other. The game was released as a free to play game in 2010, which was super novel at the time a defiantly a huge risk. We got to learn all about the difficulties of working alongside other platforms to promote and sell games on different consoles, and how Wargaming goes about navigating different laws for app development in certain countries. The most interesting thing I learned was how they advertise the game and limited editions of the game to different countries. They will get celebrity to promote the products, but they will do a different celebrity for each country depending on the taste of the country. The US had a large amount of movie stars, while Germany an Italy was more racer drivers and soccer players. This illustrated the cultural difference between our countries, but was a great marketing strategy on their end. 

Now, we were back on our way to UNIC. On our way, we spotted a restaurant named “The Garrison,” based on a popular Netflix series “Peaky Blinders”. I thought it was really cool so we went to go see if it was open for lunch but it sadly wasn’t. However, the owner and chef of of the restaurant both happened to be there and were happy to see us there and allowed us to some in and take a look around. We had a friendly conversation with us and by the end we were all hugging as we left. I though this level go hospitality was something unusual for what I would expect back home, but here it seemed completely normal. 

Back at UNIC, our first activity was a lecture on carbon emission in the supply chain. We leaned that large cargo boats release the least amount of emissions per ton kilometer, which is why they are frequently used for shipping large amounts cargo. We then calculated our own carbon footprint for this trip, and I was shocked at the amount of carbon we release to the environment just to arrive in Cyprus. I never thought traveling caused so much emissions!

Afterwords, we were onto our final activity of the day. We had a small lecture on teamwork and team building, and we were tasked with multiple team assignments to see how we adapt as a group in a variety of ways. This is something people typically will experience of school, but I think the lesson was much more intense since we are abroad. Having to communicate with people who aren’t native English speakers was a challenge because some expression didn’t get communicated as easily, but having people form very diverse backgrounds certainly allowed us to have different opinions and values which was important. Although today was a very busy day, I there were a lot of thing I learned about supply chain and working with people of different backgrounds.