On the 12th of April, UCU held its annual Career Conference. The theme was The Network Society and with the keynote speaker, Francisco van Jole (famous Dutch Internet journalist), starting the conference with a speech on how Internet is changing society and even the way we think, we went to our sessions all very much aware of the significance of networks in our daily lives. These sessions included workshops run by Bain, SNV and Unilever (both in its R&D and management capacity) amongst others, and roundtable discussions led by Dick Leurdijk (formerly of the Clingendael Institute), and Erik Stam (innovation economics professor at the Utrecht School of Economics).

Law firm De Brauw was in attendance and during their workshop they had something rather special lined up. Each of their attendees was given a robe to wear to give them a flavour of legal garb, and a case-study to work on to sharpen their legal skills.

One key aspect of this year’s Career Day was the level of alumni attendance. Unilever (Bart Stiggelbout (’07)), Bain (Reinier de Jong (’04)), Médecins Sans Frontières (Mariah Mansvelt Beck (’03)) and SNV (Marta Schäferová (’09)) were all partially represented by UCU alumni, a fact of which we are proud. The UCAA had also invited back several alumni to be visible on campus during the day for students to approach with any queries they might have about career paths and after the dinner in the Bar a chat-show was initiated with these alumni. Throughout the day alumni were interviewed on camera and these videos will be available in due course through the UCAA website. In addition to this, the number of alumni attending Career Day itself had more than quadrupled. Career Day is not just for current UC students; it is also geared towards graduates as for recruitment purposes companies are very interested in also meeting older students. To those alumni who attended a big thanks and please leave your feedback below as to what you thought of the Career Day and what could be improved or done differently in years to come.

Photos by Kiran Coleman (’05).

Do you have photos of Career Day? Speeches, workshops, chatshow… All snapshots are welcome! Send them to info@ucaa.nl.