This morning we went on a site visit to Vassos Eliades LTD. They are a distribution company that works with many brands including Nestle, Swarovski, Montblanc, etc. They provided multiple very interesting presentations to teach us about the history of their company, their supply chain management, their core values, and some of their specific products. My overall impression was that they were very kind, thoughtful people, and the people are the core of the company. Every employee we interacted with was so caring, specifically with how they provided us with coffee and treats, which was so unexpected. This kindness shows how much they truly care about their company. I believe this has a lot to do with their sustainability initiatives. Working at a company that aligns with things you care about makes the work day a whole lot better. Some sustainability observations I noted included how they have solar panels on the building, and they also pull air from the much cooler ground in order to regulate the temperatures. I found that very interesting. Nespresso (A Nestle product-I did not know that, you learn something new every day) has many recycling initiatives for their capsules and grounds, and they even asked us how we believe we can help with increasing the number of recycled pods.
Next, we took a trip back to the University of Nicosia, as you can see in the above photo, where we received a presentation from Dr. Solomous about the history of Cyprus. I noticed a lot of differences between his lecture and ones I attend at Pitt. For starters, his lecture had a lot less audience participation than I observe in the Pitt Business school. My professors tend to really walk around and engage with everyone. This lecture was more just straight talking. Another difference is at the start he explained a bunch of information and then reiterated it with visuals after it was all explained. In my lectures back home, I tend to see pictures at the same time the material is first introduced. This reiteration, however, did help me really commit some cool history facts to memory. Much like my University of Pittsburgh professors, Dr Solomous was very passionate about this subject. His passion reminded me of just how much every professor at Pitt truly enjoys what they are teaching you. 2 new facts he taught me were that Cyprus once changed rulers 3 times in the span of 1 year, and they cannot have red or blue on their flag because those are the colors associated with Greece and Turkey.