How to get a Masters degree from UCAM (Innovation and Tourism Marketing)

What about the defense of the Master’s thesis by UCAM?

I did the defense of my study. Online. Not on-site. All students who were leaving Spain didn’t have to come back to the university to do 30 minutes of defending your project. That was somehow fair. Why should I fly around half of the world from Paraguay to Spain for that?

They offered instead to do a video conference. Presenting everything with a PowerPoint presentation and a shared screen. Easy and convenient for all the ones with stage fright who prefer not to be in direct contact with the audience. But I received the approval only one day before the defending.

Very weird and shortly noted again. Especially when they write, that my project was forwarded to the tribunal. It sounds like a big and arbitrary penalty is coming soon…

But for me, it didn’t really matter to do that online with a video or on-site with the professors and examiners in the same room. I drilled myself days before to be ready for my personal defending:

Wrote a script about my verbal concept
Recorded my speech and listened to it plenty of times
Practiced maybe 50 times standing and talking to groove everything
Thought about every possible and devious scenario of mean counter-questions
Even placing some ‘verbal baits’ to provoke questions and fill the time of the round of questions

Then finally the day has come. To be accurate, it was October 4 when I did the defense of my thesis. But there was one little devious scenario I didn’t assume before. The lack of professionalism UCAM’s administration in combination with the act of nature.

What has happened?

THAT:

After all those funny and unique problems before with the submission of the digital thesis, UCAM seemed to have WiFi problems this day. By the way: That eMail was sent to ALL students of UCAM. Not only to the ones who had their online defense. I was sitting on my chair and waited in vain for my conversational partners to start my defense at Skype before I finally read this message. But okay – My tribunal couldn’t notify me without WiFi. Poor tribunal 😇

If it wouldn’t be so ridiculous, it actually could be hilarious. Just another technical problem @ UCAM. But yeah, you can never be fully protected from these types of things. On the other hand, no one came to the conclusion to use mobile data for the video calls to save the schedule. Would’ve been probably asked too much dedication and too complicated at the end 😂

Soooo…What’s next? I had to submit a video (!) and send them by the end of the day. Wow. That gave me again some bonus time to practice a few more times and record my defense until I have had the best version. Good for me!