Integration seminars: because you only get one chance to make a good first impression. So you might as well avoid that overly polished back-to-school tone where everything is supposed to bring people together, and where, deep down, nothing really happens.
At MAGELLAN DNA, we design and lead integration seminars and key program milestones that leave behind something more than three badly framed photos and a lukewarm memory. .
The ambition is simple: to make these days a moment of cohesion, revelation, and rising standards, serving the school, its values, and the students’ lasting memory of the experience.
The format is entirely bespoke..
Over 1, 2 or 3 days, on campus or at an external venue, we build a tailor-made program adapted to your educational objectives, your institutional culture, and your budget. Depending on your needs, up to two speakers/coaches can be brought together around one common thread, with facilitation designed as a coherent whole — not as a clumsy patchwork of copy-pasted workshops.
Our approach
A good integration seminar should not merely welcome students. It should set things in motion, build cohesion, reveal personalities, raise the level of attention, and give students the feeling that they are entering a school where things are thought through seriously.
At MAGELLAN DNA, we do not do “entertainment” in the decorative sense of the term. We design living, structured, demanding educational experiences, with just enough intelligence, rhythm, humour, and friction for students to remember them — for the right reasons.
“I designed these seminars as accelerators of cohesion, confidence, and lucidity. My role is not to fill time: it is to create the conditions for an experience that leaves a mark, that elevates, and that gives students a strong first image of the school, of themselves, and of others. Internationally, as in life, almost nothing begins with certainty; almost everything begins with the quality of one’s perspective, relationships, and courage.”
“The seminar is the moment when they stop playing at being students and start behaving like professionals. My role: to help them see clearly what they really want, and to align their actions with their ambitions.”
Examples of proposed modules
International conference – Building trust
A reverse-engineering of 25 years of an international career to understand what makes — or breaks — an export trajectory.
Drawing on the career path of Jean-Philippe Jourdan, founder of MAGELLAN DNA, this talk highlights the real key success factors in international business: reading context, credibility, relationships, endurance, and intercultural finesse.
Format: 1 hour 30 minutes + 30 minutes of Q&A.
Workshop – Public speaking: the two legs
Two coaches, two angles: physiology (breathing, posture, voice) + rhetoric (structure, rhythm, impact). Students then prepare a pitch on a free topic… and, inevitably, in bad faith. Objective: learn to defend the indefensible with confidence. Because professional reality often looks exactly like that. .
Workshop – Personal development: NLP & psychometric testing
A personal development coach. Individual debriefing, followed by the creation of homogeneous, optimised teams for the seminar activities. No more forming groups at random and crossing fingers like gamblers at the end of civilisation. .
Workshop – AI and critical thinking
With an AI coach and an AI with an atrocious, borderline personality. The objective: stop trading away your brain for ChatGPT, and start using the tool for what it actually is — a lever for performance, not a monument to laziness and intellectual surrender
Workshop – Culture & business: China / Japan
A coach with 25 years of B2B experience in Asia. Communication codes, meeting protocols, management of business meals. Led by someone who has lived in China, worked with Japan, and knows the difference between postcard exoticism and operational reality — where humility presides over a new world of subtlety.
Workshop – International career coaching
A time for reflection and projection on individual international career paths, led by a professional with 25 years of export experience and a track record that has generated more than one billion euros in international business development.
Serious game – the deal of the century
An intercultural and cross-disciplinary role-play in which a Lyon-based embedded AI gem working in AI and robotics is offered a major opportunity with a Japanese client established in China.
On paper, it is the deal of the century. In real life, that is precisely where the interesting trouble begins.
Students must mobilise several disciplines — business, finance, purchasing, production, logistics, negotiation, intercultural reading — to navigate a realistic, demanding, and deliberately tricky situation. With an “out of the box” ending. Source"
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