About us: Goals, Vision and Values

Posted by admin on Jun 17, 2009 in All, Campus/Faculty, Current students, Student life | 0 comments

As student ambassadors (SAs), we are a motivated, enthusiastic group of students, from many different cultures. In this article, we will introduce ourselves: we will tell you who we are, what our goals and vision are and how we intend to achieve these.

History

The group of student ambassadors started in August 2007 with initially only 8 members. The Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB) initiated the program on a trial-basis, to see whether international students could help the faculty to attract new students from abroad and help these students to feel more at home in Groningen and the Netherlands. For the SAs, this included tasks which ranged from helping people with their study progress, to picking up new students from the station. Since the faculty and SAs considered the initiative to be a great success, they decided to continue and expand the SA program in February of this year.

An information meeting was organised, where prospective SAs received information on the student ambassador organisation. Many people attended the meeting and almost everyone signed up immediately afterwards. Right now, we have a great group of 45 student ambassadors from various cultural backgrounds. We have not only extended the number of members, but also the goals of the organisation. The following section will elaborate on what we consider as our main goals and after this, we will form a vision statement, and mention the values we have to achieve this.

Goals

One of the initial goals has been to help increase the number of international students to study at our faculty and university. We believe that Groningen is a great place to study and live and we would like to give everyone the opportunity to experience this!

However, besides this, even more important to us is the goal to make international students feel at home in Groningen. We are here to provide assistance and support in every way to achieve this. We are willing to answer all kinds of questions, ranging from ‘What type of courses can I take?’ to ‘Is Groningen a good place to party’ (and yes, it is!). Finally, we want to make your stay in Groningen more fun by organising events and parties!

The third goal we wish to discuss, is the internationalisation of our faculty and university. Nowadays, globalisation is an important issue and the university should keep up with this trend. The FEB has the goal to more than double the number of international students at our faculty within 10 years, and to eventually teach all study programs in English. We provide the Faculty Board with information on how to achieve this and we take a critical standpoint as to the progress towards this ambitious goal. (Please find the article about the meeting with our Dean Henk Sol for more information on internationalisation and contacts with the faculty.)

The final point we want to stress, is the improvement of educational quality. This is a goal of the FEB as well, but we want to make sure that this goal is actually achieved. Although the University of Groningen is a good university, education is a process of continuous improvement and in our contacts with the faculty we stress the topics of education that we find of importance and which we think need improvement.

Vision

From the goals mentioned above, we can derive the vision of the student ambassador organisation, which represents where we want to be in the future. First, we want to increase the number of students studying at our faculty each year, furthermore we want every international student to feel at home in Groningen, we intend to transform the FEB into a faculty that is known for its internationality, and we want all the courses provided by the faculty to be of high-quality. To achieve this, we have formed the following values: ‘dedication’, ‘interaction’, and ‘diversity’, which are also included in our logo.

We hope that this article provides clarification on who we, as student ambassadors, are and what we do. Of course, we are also involved in some other matters less related to the goals above, but the four goals mentioned here represent the foundation of our ideas as a group. We will work to reach these goals and we are always open to suggestions. If you have any suggestions as to other topics you want us to discuss, or when you have other ideas or questions, please visit the forum on this website.

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Plenty of universities are investing in modernizing their ICT facilities. Is this worth anything if the staff and/or students are unable to work with technological developments?

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Since I applied for the bachelor-programm IB&M I have been reading many times about the Honours Bachelor Track.I was motivated right from the beginning to achieve the propadeuse in the first year and to obtain more points than the average. That sounds very general but, in fact, it was not easy sometimes to follow the curriculum adequately.

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Now you can find the first photo documentation about one day as a student in Groningen.

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International Business and Management (IB&M)

Posted by admin on May 18, 2009 in All, Campus/Faculty, Programmes, Prospective students | 0 comments

The department International Business & Management (IB&M) is part of the Faculty of Management and Organization of the University of Groningen.

The IB&M unit’s specialization is designed to prepare students for the growing number of career opportunities in today’s internationalizing world. The IB&M courses on offer are meant to be much more than state-of-the-international-art courses taught in English. What sets our IB&M programme apart from apart from other internationalized courses is its specialization cross-/trans-/super-national issues based on the assertion that there are substantive specificities related to International Business and Management. Such specificities rest on the insight that work in multinational companies, across borders and in supranational institutions requires academic and practical attention to:

• cross-national differences in the world, in so far as they concern business and management practices, and the wider culture and institutions these are locally embedded in.
• the functioning of multinational enterprises, as entities that typically cross-cut the above-mentioned differences and require actors to develop mobility across borders and integrate activities across much larger cultural and institutional distances.
• the particular challenge of transferring business and management practices across borders, coming to terms with cultural, institutional and complex organizational divides
• supra-national structures and processes in the international economy, including regulation of trade, finance and other supra-national norms.
• foreign languages (beyond English), culture-specific behavior and intercultural communication (understanding and adequate reaction), and more general cultural, institutional, and political knowledge about foreign settings.

Find more information under IB & M  or just ask us in the facebook comments section below.

Student ambassador meets delegation from South Africa

Posted by admin on Apr 10, 2008 in All, Facilities | 0 comments

Groningen. Clemens, one of our student ambassadors, was given the chance to introduce our website to a delegation from the Tshwane University of Technology, Pretoria (South Africa). The delegation visited the University of Groningen with the intention to learn more about the use of ICT within the everyday life at the university.