24 CEMS Club Presidents and 2 organizing members from the Student Board were gathered in person at HEC Paris in France and 2 CEMS Club Presidents joined the meeting online. This was the highest recorded attendance in the history of the conference, and the first ever attendance for CEMS Club Bogota. During the three-day 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 at the URW Lab, where they were kindly invited by the CEMS Corporate Partner Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield. They had the opportunity to have lunch with CEMS alumni working for URW and were introduced to the company through a presentation led by the Group Talent Development Manager, Laure de Moussac
In addition, the company offered the Presidents to visit URW’s biggest project, a shopping mall in the Centre of New Industries and Technologies (CNIT). It was a delight to learn more about URW and see one of their state-of-the-art projects.
To close the day, the CEMS Club Presidents were welcomed for dinner by Christopher Harriss, Executive Director, Master in International Business – CEMS MIM program at HEC Paris.
On the day, the Student Board President, Nathalie Guillium introduced the CEMS Student Board and Executive Team strategy. Nathalie dived deeper into the Student Board’s projects for the year to come and provided relevant information about the organisation. Following this, Victor Tibo from the CEMS Entrepreneurs shared insights about his journey and entrepreneuship in general. The morning ended with a presentation by the Global Office Update with Juan Pablo Tostado and Vesa Zatriqi. Juan Pablo and Vesa updated the CEMS Club Presidents on relevant events, communication materials and held a Q&A session with the students.
The Saturday afternoon was dedicated to hearing from the Presidents themselves through an issue sharing session: Presidents brainstormed solutions for each issue in small teams and then shared their insights to the bigger group to help all CEMS Clubs improve on all aspects. These sessions are essential to the CEMS Global Alliance as they enable stakeholders to share best practices, learn more about each other and to improve collaboration.
To close the day, the conferenced move forward to announce the long-awaited Best Practice Awards! These were divided into 6 categories, as well as an overall award for Best CEMS Club. The winners of this fall semester were:
Alumni: #1 Budapest, #2 St Gallen, #3 Prague
Corporate: #1 St Gallen, #2 Vienna, #3 Paris
Marketing: #1 Lisbon, #2 Prague, #3 Vienna
Responsibility: #1 Hong Kong, #2 Vienna, #3 St Gallen
Socializing: #1 Paris, #2 St Gallen, #3 Santiago
Desired: #1 Budapest & Istanbul, #2 Lisbon, #3 Prague
Best club: #1 St Gallen, #2 Vienna, #3 Budapest
A huge congratulations to all the teams who worked so hard at a local level to create the best CEMS community possible!
The third and final day of the CEMS Club Conference kicked off with a presentation from each president of their buddy programs. The programme was organised in a way that each buddy came from either a Long, medium or short-standing CEMS Club. This meant that older CEMS Clubs could receive innovative feedback from newer CEMS Clubs and newer CEMS Clubs could profit from the experience of older CEMS Clubs. The CEMS Club Presidents then had the opportunity to present their “elevator pitches” on ideas they are looking to implement in their own school and that could profit other schools.
This marked the end of all CCC meetings and an international picnic led all the Presidents to share a bit about their country while saying goodbye!
The CEMS Club Conference is a perfect opportunity for participants to connect, share their Clubs‘ strengths and weaknesses, best practices and participate in fruitful discussions with the various CEMS stakeholders.
The CEMS Global Alliance would like to thank Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield and HEC Paris, including Laure de Moussac, Christopher Harris and Françoise Figarola for hosting this event. In addition, the Alliance would like to thank the Student Board CEMS Club Support Team, including Jan Budinský and Felicia Schneider for organising this initiative.
The CEMS Student Board would like to thank all presidents for taking the time to attend the 18th CCC and hopefully, they will be able to bring all their insights back to their local CEMS!
We are looking forward to the next edition in Spring 2024!
