24 CEMS Club Presidents and 4 organizing members from the Student Board were gathered in person at WU in Vienna, Austria. During the two-days conference, the Presidents had the opportunity to have an issue and solution-sharing session, network, discuss best practices and brainstorm on development and collaboration between their local CEMS Clubs.
The Presidents were welcomed on Friday by the Student Board Representatives and CEMS Corporate Relations Manager of WU, Jana Vadura, who started the conference off by introducing the school and the CEMS Master and experience at WU.
Following this insightful session, each CEMS Club President had the opportunity to introduce themselves, their CEMS Clubs and highlight the main issue they were facing through a one pager. This was followed by a brief introduction of the Global Responsibility Week initiative led by the CEMS Responsible Leadership Team, represented by Student Board Representative Anthony Verpoten (LSM). The session invited the presidents to brainstorm around the organization and implementation of innovative events and projects on the following topics : Gender Equality, Sustainability, Diversity & Inclusion, Ethical Management and Poverty alleviation.
The latter part of this morning included a short update from the CEMS Global Office, represented by Margaux Berras, and a deep dive into the Student Board’s projects and the Executive team’s strategy for the year presented by the SBR Vice-President of Finance, Joelle Soumi.
After having a fruitful afternoon discussions on current issues impacting their CEMS Clubs and brainstorming on potential solutions, the Presidents had the opportunity to present their “elevator pitches” on topics they found particularly relevant to discuss. Some clubs notably shared new exciting professional events for students such as the Budapest Case Cup competition or the Dublin Tech Tour.
The second day of the conference
got off to an exciting start with the announcement of the results of the CEMS Club Awards presented by SBR Qinzi Zhao (LSE). It's important to highlight that this year marks a record since all clubs were qualified by votes from their cohorts to send in their best practices, resulting in the submission of 117 best practices! The awards are divided into six categories, as well as a “Best CEMS Club” award.
The winners of this spring semester were:
- Alumni: #1 Rotterdam, #2 Lisbon, #3 Calcutta
- Corporate: #1 Barcelona, #2 Vienna, #3 Budapest
- Marketing: #1 Calcutta, #2 Copenhagen, #3 St Gallen
- Responsibility: #1 Prague, #2 St Gallen, #3 Calcutta
- Socializing: #1 St Gallen, #2 Prague, #3 Rotterdam
- Desired: #1 Calcutta, #2 St Gallen, #3 Milan
- Best club: #1 St Gallen, #2 Prague, #3 Vienna
We would like to extend our congratulations to all winning CEMS Clubs and all other CEMS Clubs for their participation and work throughout the semester!
The announcement of the CEMS Club Award paved the way for an ideation session for presidents on how to reform and update the voting process and selection of best practices for these awards. Presidents brainstormed together and submitted creative solutions that will be implemented over the coming semesters to improve the voting process to make it notably fairer, more inclusive of all clubs, more objective in the best practices selection and more representative of each club's efforts.
After a well-deserved lunch and a tour of the WU campus to digest, the presidents were able to refine their sharing discussion outcomes from the previous day in small groups. Each presented their action plan to solve their main problem to the other presidents in their break-out rooms, and received direct feedback from the other as well as tools to help them improve this latter plan.
Finally, the conference concluded with two sessions presented by different SBR teams who joined the conference online. The first session, led by Emilie Plater from the Alumni Relations team, encouraged presidents to create projects and events around the Global Alumni Week event that took place in late March. The second session, led by Yoshihiro Kaneko (KEIO) from the Global Integration Task Force, aimed to assign each president to a Buddy groups of three to four clubs for the remainder of the semester to foster communication and support between them. Buddy clubs will thus be able to continue the work of the conference for the rest of the semester, drawing inspiration and advice from each other to improve the collaboration and global integration of all CEMS clubs and schools.
To celebrate the end of the conference all together, CEMS Club Presidents got invited to a social activity in the evening to network with the CEMS Club Vienna and for the ones staying an extra day, to a Walking Tour of Vienna’s city center led by SBR Julio Duarte (FGV).
The Student Board sincerely hopes that the Presidents found this 19th CCC edition eventful and insightful, and that they have returned to their local CEMS Clubs with new ideas and inspiration, as well as renewed motivation for the remainder of their tenure.
The CEMS Global Alliance would like to thank WU University, including Jana Salot, Jana Vadura, Philipp Nell and Desislava Dikova for hosting this event. In addition, the Alliance would like to thank the Student Board CEMS Club Support Team, including Juliette Navarre, Felicia Schneider, Witkoria Ruenbenbauer, Andrej Bederka, Qinzi Zhao, Korbinian Thiele, Andres Ordenes Torres, Francesca Girelli and Caitriona Lefevere for organising this initiative.
We are looking forward to the next edition in Fall 2024!
