Our school loves welcoming its new students. After listening to the welcome speeches given by our directors, the students learned to work together and get to know one another. Here’s a report on the first day of the GBBAA, TEMA and CESEM programmes.

9:30 a.m. Delphine Manceau, NEOMA school dean, welcomes the students in the amphitheatre.

“Today you begin a new stage of your studies and, in reality, a new stage of your life. You are going to discover a new environment, make new friends, live in a new city, start new student society and sports activities, start studying new subjects and discover new ways of teaching. This new adventure that starts today will transform you. And you will no longer be the same in three, four or five years when you graduate from the school.

“Your greatest challenge now will be to learn how to choose. But choosing means rejecting other options and rejecting these options is very difficult. My advice is to look at all of these opportunities and ask yourself what moves you, what attracts you, what gives you a boost of energy. Learning to choose and test and test yourself, it’s the test-and-learn approach that I suggest that you apply”.

10:30 a.m. Alain Goudey, associate dean of digital technology at NEOMA, has closely followed the development of artificial intelligence. The professor who has already integrated it into his marketing courses offers an inaugural lesson on the subject of these types of intelligence in the 21^st century.

“Generative artificial intelligence is an immense avenue of opportunity. But we must distinguish the performance of intelligence. In terms of performance, the computer is superior, but it consumes a lot of energy. As for intelligence, humans are superior and they consume less energy.

“Generative artificial intelligence will not do the work for us because it has hallucinations and bias. It is built on an American and libertarian vision of the world. It will always generate a text with this vision. It is thus vital that humans develop a new intelligence with both an understanding of A.I.’s function and a critical mindset on this technology”.

 11:30 a.m. In Rouen and Reims, the musicians of Happy Unity took the stage for a musical activity. In Paris, rugby players introduced the students to Haka. 

All the students in the venue were also given boomwhakers, a strange tube instrument made from recycled waste material. Together, even though they didn’t know each other yet, they played Viva la Vida by the English group Coldplay. The aim was to create a harmonious sound by listening to each other, so they can form teams that work together with the same rhythm like an orchestra. In Paris, Haka was the event. The rugby players introduced all the new students to this famous choreography of the All Blacks. The aim there was to develop team spirit and a genuine sense of class unity.

The students then took a seminar on entrepreneurship, CSR, innovation and diversity. The goal was to promote interactions and collective unity.