When the National Agency for Academic Exchange in 2018 made a call for entries for the International Alumni Project, we did not hesitate for a moment. We thought: this is the perfect time to get more involved in cooperation with graduates. We want this Project to become an impulse for activities that go beyond the time frame in which it is implemented.
Improving our relationship with Jagiellonian University graduates was set as the priority aim. We considered various options, including creating a special platform dedicated to our graduates. However, on second thoughts, we decided to choose an already existing solution to offer great opportunities and reach out to a huge community of people who were associated with the University. We chose the LinkedIn platform as a place where people from business and science meet.
In the first phase of the Project, we developed a communication strategy which we have been putting into practice since October 2019. We want to provide our graduates with interesting content: current news about the Jagiellonian University, details of upcoming events, conferences, trainings, workshops, as well as interesting interviews and articles.
We also want our profile to become a place of contact with Alma Mater for our graduates. In September 2019, we ran a special survey in which we asked about the possibility of cooperation and expectations towards the Jagiellonian University. The response surprised us. We got several hundred responses, which gave us tremendous help in making plans for the nearest future and setting the direction in which we should go.
Face-to-face conversations with people who took part in the study and agreed to be contacted has already given us an idea about some activities that we will provide together. Some of the graduates have shared their professional career stories with us, some have expressed their readiness to be mentors.
Speaking of mentors, we would like to mention the second part of the Project Jagiellonian University Alumni Programme of cooperation with overseas graduates of the Jagiellonian University. Nine of our alumni mentors hosted a special meeting, which we moved from the university campus to the Internet due to the pandemic. On 11 May 2020, hte graduates met online with Jagiellonian University representatives, including Vice-Rector for Didactics prof. dr hab. Armen Edigarian and Director of the Didactic Support Center Piotr Szumliński. It was the culmination of the training cycle prepared by mentors for the students of our University. Each of them hosted three webinar meetings on topics related to the development of a career path in the industry represented by a given mentor.
Students had the opportunity to learn about the job market situation directly from practitioners living and working now outside Poland.
We are currently preparing materials summarizing the Project. These will include a report and a clip presenting showing our progress in the project.
Project Manager - Piotr Rapciak
As part of the JU Alumni project, Program for the development of cooperation with foreign graduates of the Jagiellonian University, from March to May last year, 9 mentoring cycles were conducted. The last, tenth cycle took place in November 2020. Each cycle consisted of three webinars. 163 students of the Jagiellonian University took part in the webinars.
