CEMS Mentoring Programme 2017 kicked off

We are proud to share that the 2017 CEMS Mentoring Programme has been kicked off. The mentoring programme has been relaunched after a few years break as a joint initiative of the CEMS Alumni Association Czech Republic and CEMS Club Prague. Big thank you goes to Ulyana Makarava, who stood at the beginning of this idea.

We are happy that 25 alumni signed up as mentors and almost the same number of students want to become mentees. We are glad to see that also exchange students as well as CEMS alumni living abroad signed up for the programme.

Students are primarily interested in the start-up area and entrepreneurship, modern technologies, international career and living abroad. This is combined with the traditional fields such as consulting, marketing or finance. It is great to see that new as well as senior alumni are part of the programme.

In order to get to know each other, both students and alumni were invited for the CEMS Mentoring kick-off event that took place on 23^rd February 2017 in the restaurant Nola in Prague 4. The main purpose of this event was to get to know each other and the whole evening was prepared in an informal atmosphere.

Michaela Novakov shared her experience with mentoring and thereby introduced the concept to students. All participating alumni said a few words about themselves.

Students and alumni then got a chance to mingle and enjoy the networking part. The evening was further followed by a dinner. During the evening, students could have also read through the profiles of alumni, who were not able to come to this event. You can check photos from this event HERE. 

After receiving students’ preferences, the CEMS Alumni Association Czech Republic together with CEMS Club Prague did the matching process. Once the assigned students were confirmed by alumni, the mentoring itself could have started.

Mentees and mentors have the complete freedom to agree on time, frequency and topic of their discussion. In order to share best practise, we will do a half term experience sharing. The final evaluation is going to be done on 8^th June 2017 during the CEMS Soiree at the University of Economics in Prague.

The mentoring programme is currently prepared as a semester initiative, though we hope that mentors and mentees wil stay in touch also in the future. As also Michaela Novakov mentioned, the important element of successful mentoring is on one side good match between mentor and mentee and on the other side long-term collaboration.

Thank you all for your support to make the 2017 CEMS Mentoring Programme happen.

Kind regards,

Pavlina

CEMS Alumni Board Czech Republic