The great APAC customer visit tour – Part 3
The final leg of our tour sees us in Brisbane to visit our Queensland universities, this has included getting back home (or onward to our holidays as it is in my case), four flights, four taxis and one visit to the wrong campus. It seems like only yesterday I was arriving in Middle Earth, ahem, I mean New Zealand and waiting for Alison to arrive.
Looking forward then, it seemed we had an action packed two and a half weeks ahead of us with eleven customer visits and a two day conference to fit into that time. I thought it was ambitious but I didn’t doubt for a second that Alison had this in the bag. I have since come to realise that she is a walking, talking, organising machine, and I would have been lost without her.
So it was with a sense of achievement and disbelief we had nearly reached the end, that we embarked on our next set of visits in a cloudy Brisbane. The sunshine in the sunshine state arrived eventually, but not in our first few days.
Our first stop of the last leg was to visit with Queensland University of Technology (QUT). This was where we encountered our one and only hiccup of this trip. We had a leisurely walk to the campus, admired its beautiful setting right next to the Parliament building and got there with good time to grab a coffee and do some work whilst marvelling at the exotic bird (I think it’s an Australian White Ibis) casually traipsing through the cafe as casually as a pigeon might back home.
It was only when we went to join our meeting that we realised our faux pas, we had been sat at the cafe in the Gardens Point campus when we should have been at the QUT campus at Kelvin Grove, a few suburbs away. With Uber to the rescue, we managed to get where we needed to be in approximately ten minutes. Once at the right campus, I had to take a moment to take in the scale and setting of it.
The size and greenery did not diminish as we continued with our visits, meeting both Griffith University and University of Queensland on the same day, I was literally floored by the sheer size of both campuses and the beautiful landscape they were surrounded by.
Our final visits to our Queensland universities was a good ending to what has been an eye opening and valuable trip for me. As I said in one of the earlier blogs about this trip, putting names to faces, meeting people for the first time, hearing about the strategy and what is important to our APAC universities during our visits and during Insight APAC 2016 has been a really invaluable experience for me. Thank you to everyone who made the time to meet with us, I will be taking back what I’ve learned to share with the rest of the Talis team in the UK.
Read Keji’s blog – The Great APAC Customer Tour – Part 1, New Zealand
Read Keji’s blog – The Great APAC Customer Tour – Part 2
