Day 5 – Lecture, Pizza and Gymnastics

This day began at 9 am with a lecture by Greg Accardo, Professor of the professional Sales Institute. He told us something about Sales processes and why Sales is also important in engineering. He showed us the interface between Sales and Engineering and introduced us to some interesting examples. Sales can be summarized with two aspects: solving problems and archieving goals. Based on this lecture, he gave us his podcast, some books and other research possibilities to learn more about the topic.

Afterwards another professor from LSU, Andrew Maas, gave a lecture on the topic “From research to commercialization: the basics from intellectual property”. He explained the differences between patents, copyrights and trademarks and went into each of these areas in more detail. For each topic, he presented us with the most important facts; for example, which things are protected by each of these themes and how long the protection lasts. 

At 5:30 pm a pizza dinner started together with the buddies – so everybody could officially get to know his buddy for the first time. Afterwards we visited the gymnastics sports event together. Gymnastics is a sport at LSU which is exclusively for girls and where LSU is very far ahead in the ranking. It was exciting to see how the young talents can move and with what enthusiasm and perfection this sport is practiced. The hall was really full, which created a nice and loud atmosphere.

After the gymnastics a buddy organized a small party – very classical American with red cups, beer pong and music for dancing. For us Germans it was a nice end of the first week and a good opportunity to get into conversation with many people and to continue to immerse more and more into the American lifestyle.