December’s member of the month is Meike Janssen, a lively and dedicated master student of Strategic Management. She has been leading the NCE Committee with vigor and hence it is no surprise that she has been chosen as the member of the month. We asked her to tell us something about how the committee experienced the Nijmegen Career Event, which led to the following story:
On the 23rd and 24th of November, the Nijmegen Career Event 2021 took place. We were very happy that the event took place physically! It is valuable to connect, especially in these times.
We will talk you through our journey of organising the NCE. Our journey started in February when we divided into our subcommittees. Then, we started brainstorming about the NCE in general, the theme and changes that we wanted to make. At that time, all the communication had to be online due to COVID-19. This made it difficult to connect with each other, so we organised pizza parties online and photo shoots offline. After one month of having known each other online, we met physically. It was fun to see how different our perceptions were about how everyone looked and how tall everyone was in real life. At the beginning of our committee meetings, we did small games during our break to get to know each other a bit better and to make the meeting more informal. An example was that Anne often is very moody in the morning and Meike likes singing.
In preparation for the event, our subcommittee external searched for companies. They tried to diversify the kinds of companies that would participate during the event. The subcommittee internal, focused on the theme of our NCE, started with the organisation of promotional activities such as the opening stunt. Together with the subcommittee organisation, they also started coming up with ideas for the goodies. We tried to combine the goodies with our theme “the journey to…”, for example with the passport holder. Our treasurer started with the first draft of the budget.
During the opening stunt in September the subscriptions opened. After that, we organised a few workshops and food promos to get the attention of students. This was quite a lot of fun because it finally became “real”.
Of course, we also had some struggles within the committee. The people within the subcommittee internal changed a few times and that made it difficult to stay consistent with our promotion. But eventually, we were very happy with our social media, magazine and website. Furthermore, we had some uncertainty about the COVID-19 measurements, but we are very pleased that we could have the event physically instead of online.
During the NCE, we organised different kinds of activities in which students could hear about what a company does and what it would be like working in this company. There was also a very nice opening talk. Kai Vermaas talked about his journey and shared something for us to remember in our future. We also had a very nice lunch, an interesting business market and a drink at the end of the day.
We, as the committee, found the event very successful. We really tried to make sure that all the students and companies had no worries during the event. Students and companies gave us positive remarks about how everything was taken care of and they were especially happy that the event could be held physically.
As chair of the NCE committee, I am very happy about the result. Also, I am very proud of the other committee members which I have worked with. We made a strong connection within the committee and we were motivated to bring this event to a success, which we did!
We would like to thank Meike for submitting her story and Synergy is very proud of how the NCE Committee organised the event!
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