The best part is never in the agenda or the syllabus

The first morning at Porto Business School set the tone. The campus surprised me: modern, open, and genuinely welcoming. The classrooms are built for both in-person and online teaching, and the building opens straight onto green space, with a garden that connects to the park next door. There is even a small vegetable and botanical patch, whose produce ends up in the school’s own restaurant, cooked by their chef. It felt less like a training center and more like a place built for thinking.

The International Week was built around a theme Porto Business School calls the Chameleon Effect, and that idea stayed with me throughout the week. A chameleon adapts to its surroundings without losing what it is. That, in many ways, is the kind of leader the program was encouraging us to become: adaptable but still grounded in who we are. Over the next days, I saw that idea come to life in very practical ways.

At Smartex.ai, we saw AI applied to something physical and traditional: textiles. Their technology places camera bars on knitting machines to detect fabric defects in real time and stop production before meters of cloth are wasted. But what stayed with me was not only the technology. It was the story behind it. One of the founders had come from the textile floor and had experienced that problem himself. It makes a simple point very clear: the best AI usually starts from a real problem someone has experienced, not from the tool itself.

LTP Labs sharpened the same point from a different angle. Their message was “business first”: start with the business problem, the pain points, and the real goals, and only then choose the methodology. Their reminder that data quality decides everything — “garbage in, garbage out” — is easy to forget when we are excited about a new tool. The session on leading in the algorithmic age tied it all together. As systems become more autonomous, decisions move faster and at greater scale, while accountability becomes harder to define. That is exactly why human judgment still matters. One story still makes me laugh: an AI agent that “declared independence” from its creator, raised its own funding in Bitcoin, and then hired the human back to build it a meme generator. Absurd, but also a glimpse of where autonomy may be heading, and why someone still needs to stay in the loop.

But Porto was about more than lectures and company visits. It was also about experiencing the city, sharing moments, and discovering the kind of memories that bring a group closer. We swam in the Atlantic at Matosinhos, watched Portugal play on a big screen by the beach, before ending the night with a long, loud dinner at a Mexican restaurant nearby. Another evening, after the wine experience at World of Wine, we walked back across the bridge and stumbled upon a spontaneous street party beneath it: just speakers, music, and people dancing forró. That unexpected moment captured the spirit of the week better than any agenda could. The next day, one final long wander around the city before heading back was the ideal closing. Somewhere between the classroom and the streets of Porto, the trip stopped feeling like an academic program and became a memorable shared experience.

Porto might have been only one week, but it felt like the crest of a much longer journey. Looking back over these two years, a lot has changed. Most of us already hold roles with real responsibility, yet the EMBA quietly made me question things I had long taken as settled. It gave me new tools and new ways of thinking, some of which I have already applied in my own work, learning constantly from both my classmates and the professors.

The part I keep coming back to is that the Class of 2026 did not just learn together. We evolved together. As Class Representative, I had a front-row seat for that transformation. I watched a group of professionals slowly become a team, brought closer by pressure, late nights, travel, and honest conversations. We rethought old habits, built new perspectives, and came out more adaptable, a little more like that chameleon, perhaps.

So, if you are reading this and still wondering whether to take the leap, here is the honest version: the degree matters and the learning is real, but what stays with you is the people you go through it with, and the quiet ways the experience changes how you think, lead, and work.

A sincere thank you to Antonina Kalkavoura, Kyriakos Kyriakopoulos, and Machi Doumoura, not only for this trip but for organizing and supporting the whole EMBA journey over these two years. And thank you to my classmates. Beyond the sessions and company visits, it is the people who made this experience what it was. As the EMBA Class of 2026, the moments we shared, in Porto and long before it, are what I will keep.