Anne Gaedeke

Anne is running for the posts: Vice-President, Treasurer, Secretary

****************ANNE'S VISION IN WORDS*********************

Anne’s point of view and ideas about EAAA

Introduction

My name is Anne, I come from Germany and belong to G4. I enjoyed studying EuroAquae, especially the chance to meet many interesting people. Therefore, I would like to join EAAA in order to improve communication between alumni as well as to facilitate ties between current students and alumni.
The main activities of the next EAAA board that I would like to further strengthen are outlined below.
Make EAAA become more visible and active for alumni as well as current students
When I was still a student, I have to admit that I was not really aware of the activities of EAAA. Therefore, bridging the activities and information between current students and alumni is very important.
However, information sharing should be done in as transparent and non-disruptive fashion as possible.

Information sharing

Information about upcoming events that might be interesting for professionals in the water sector, such as conferences, workshops, fairs etc. are a great meeting point for students and alumni with other people from the water/hydroinformatics community and can serve the purpose of personal networking and of promoting EuroAquae.


Upgrading of the means of communication

The existing Forum needs some upgrading. It needs to become more user-friendly and should be used as a platform for discussions of not only of a personal nature but also where people can help each other in their professional and academic lives. In addition, the alumni section on the EuroAquae website itself is kind of hidden and should become more structured and organized. A database should be kept of the location and current status of alumni as well as potential employees.
The website could be used again to promote EuroAquae externally as well as publish interesting information. The possibility of providing RSS feeds for the all activities on the forum should be investigated and a mass of emails, except for the most important ones, should be avoided. In this way the interested persons can get all the information that they want without being drowned in unwanted emails.

Consistency and answerability in the activities of the EAAA Coordination Board

Organisation of the activities of the EAAA CB should be in such a way that the roles of all the members are well defined and each member fulfils his/her task responsibly. But throughout this, the Coordination Board should present a united face to the alumni and students so that people aren’t hesitant to take their grievances to the board.

Regards,
Anne

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Hi everybody, please ask questions to Anne by clicking on post reply at this topic. Please note the voting starts on the 18th of October 2009. The voting will be done through this forum.

Hi I thought of starting to ask the questions to the candidates.

1. After the graduation, the people tend to get busier and busier, therefore I wonder how good your time management skills are as they will have to be of a good quality in order to combine work/studies/research, EAAA involvement and personal life?

2. Good time management skills are not enough, it is important to work as a team. Therefore how do you see yourself working in a team of 6 people or more (see the question number 4)?

3. During the last past two years, I saw that the willingness to be initiative plays a very important role. How initiative are you?

4. The number of the graduates of the EAAA is growing, and it is getting harder to manage the potential demands of the six generations (in two years there will be eight generations), therefore after a brief discussion among some of the members of the CB of EAAA, we decided that it would be good to create an Executive Committee which will comprise some 10 – 20 people, each of them having a certain responsibility such as updating a website, preparing the Star of the Month articles, checking and responding to the messages on the forum. The Constitution of the EAAA already has the provision of such an Executive Committee. The Constitution can be downloaded from here (opens a PDF file). What do you think of such an idea?

Thank you for your responses.

Kostya

Hi everyone, please see my answers below each question!

Quote :

1. After the graduation, the people tend to get busier and busier, therefore I wonder how good your time management skills are as they will have to be of a good quality in order to combine work/studies/research, EAAA involvement and personal life?

My job gives me, fortunately, quite some flexibility concerning working hours and work time. In addition, I will be based in Cottbus for the next few years which gives me the opportunity to be close to at least one EuroAquae partner and some current students.
During my Bachelor studies and also partly during EuroAquae, I managed to have a student job along with my studies and other extra activities.
I believe the more things we do that we like, the better we plan and the more efficient we get.

Quote :

2. Good time management skills are not enough, it is important to work as a team. Therefore how do you see yourself working in a team of 6 people or more (see the question number 4)?

As far as I can remember, I have worked, played or studied in groups or teams. I have to say, it is not always easy, especially when people do not have the same goal or vision. In my opinion, good communication and respect for each other along with a good coordination are the most important things. However, I know most of the EAAA candidates; this makes me quite confident that working together will be a quite smooth and fun.

Quote :

3. During the last past two years, I saw that the willingness to be initiative plays a very important role. How initiative are you?

I can generally say that if I am doing something that I like, I generally don’t think about being initiative, I rather do it intuitively. If I am able to initiate people then depends more if they liked my ideas I guess

Quote :

4. The number of the graduates of the EAAA is growing, and it is getting harder to manage the potential demands of the six generations (in two years there will be eight generations), therefore after a brief discussion among some of the members of the CB of EAAA, we decided that it would be good to create an Executive Committee which will comprise some 10 – 20 people, each of them having a certain responsibility such as updating a website, preparing the Star of the Month articles, checking and responding to the messages on the forum. The Constitution of the EAAA already has the provision of such an Executive Committee. The Constitution can be downloaded from here (opens a PDF file). What do you think of such an idea?

In my opinion, group might not get more efficient if it’s bigger unless it is very well coordinated (which of course also gets more complicated in a bigger group).
However, I think that the EAAA board should be open to anyone who would like to contribute and get involved in the work of the EAAA.
Concerning the activities, I must say that I agree very much with Vikram’s comment.