An account of the Nijmegen Career Event

By Meike Janssen.

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 party’s online and photo shoots offline. After one month of knowing 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 relations searched for companies. They tried to diversify the kinds of companies that would participate during the event. The subcommittee internal relations 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 designing goodies. We tried to combine the goodies with our theme “The journey to…”, for example with the passport holder. In this period 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 in organising this event. Organising an event of this size cannot go without bumps in the road. Nevertheless, we worked through all minor and major setbacks. For instance, we had some uncertainty about the COVID-19 measures, but luckily the event could take place physically instead of online.

During the NCE, we organised different kinds of activities in which students could hear about what the company they were interacting with does and what it would be like working at this company. There was also a very nice opening talk, Kai Vermaas talked about his journey and gave us a something to remember in our future. Finally, we had a very nice lunch, an interesting business fair 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 off 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!