Hear from 2025-2027 student Monike Sánchez Troetsch about her first semester on GLOCAL and her perseverance in never giving up in applying to be part of the programme. Her words are below.
Four applications. Three postponements. One decision that changed everything.
There’s a version of me that gave up. Honestly, after years of applying, deferring, and wondering if the timing would ever be right, it would have been easy to let it go.
But here I am, wrapping up my first semester at the University of Glasgow and already deep into my second at the Universitat de Barcelona.
And I can say without hesitation: it was worth the wait.
This semester didn’t just add credentials to my CV. It genuinely rewired the way I think.After more than a decade working in marketing research, communications, and business strategy across Latin America and the Caribbean, I thought I had a solid mental map of how markets and organizations worked. What I didn’t expect was how much I didn’t know about why they work the way they do.
Exploring how different political economies shape business behavior made me look at everything I had done professionally through a completely new lens, why certain strategies work in some markets and completely fail in others, why institutional context is not background noise but the actual stage on which business plays out. It explained patterns I had observed for years but never had the framework to articulate.
One of the highlights of the semester? Our research on Botswana — arguably one of the most fascinating economic stories on the African continent. While so many resource-rich nations fell into familiar traps of corruption, conflict, and dependency, Botswana carved a radically different path with its diamond industry. We dug into why, what made it exceptional, what institutional choices created that divergence, and what the rest of the world can learn from it.
That work earned our team the Ganseliesel & Yatsuhashi Prize (thank you to my awesome teammates Amara Agomuo and Aanya Agarwal), and honestly? This is the kind of research that reminds you why you choose to go back to school in the first place. 🏆
Then there’s the classroom itself, and I mean that beyond four walls.
Being surrounded by peers from different countries, industries, and worldviews has been one of the most underrated parts of this experience. In marketing and research, we talk endlessly about understanding diverse audiences. But living that diversity in every seminar, debate, and group project is something no methodology course can replicate.
And on a more personal note, I finally started learning German. Something I’ve wanted to do for years, partly because language is a professional asset, but mostly because it brings me a little closer to my family roots. There’s something quietly meaningful about that.
To anyone sitting on an application, wondering if it’s too late, if the timing is off, if the opportunity has passed, sometimes the path that asks the most of you before it even begins is the one that gives the most back.
On to semester two.
