LC Zurich has elected its EB 10/11

LC Zurich has elected its new executive board! We hereby present you the EB 10/11:

LCP - Anne-Sophie Chiarello

VPTM - Albert Gubler

VPX - Nadine Engbersen

VPIM - Alexandre Krylov

VPF / VPER – You?

The second round for the positions of VP Finance and VP External Relations has already started and applications will be accepted until January 29^th by our current LCP.

Read below the portraits of Anne-Sophie, Albert and Nadine to get to know your future leaders!

Corina Binz

More pictures...

Anne-Sophie Chiarello - LCP 10/11

So who is this newly elected LCP of yours? Well, some facts first: my name is Anne-Sophie Chiarello, and I was born in Basel, did my first years of schooling there and then spent my 10th year travelling around Australia with my mother. Upon our return I attended a boarding school near Rapperswil led by monstrous nuns (just kidding). Five years later I decided I had had enough of this gloomy place called Switzerland and headed for my first year of exchange in Beijing, China, where I attended a Chinese high school and lived with a local family for a year. I decided to stay, found myself a place in the German Embassy School, an apartment, a room mate and a job and embarked on my new life there. This was the time I first had contact with @ers and well, their unique way of dealing with a new culture.
Now I‘m studying law in my third semester and although people tend of that as such a boring subject I highly disagree. If anyone wants to take up the conversation here, you know where to find me ;-)
As you might have heard, I joined @ during October 09 and so have not much @-experience to offer. „Do it“ was an amazingly life changing experience, but then conferences seem to have a large impact on any newie.
It was there that my decision to run for an EB position turned into the certainty that I will attempt to run for LCP. The challenge seemed so great and the move very bold from my side, but I had nothing to lose. I believe the position of LCP to be a very demanding one, shouldering a lot of responsibility, seeking to get out the best in every member, take firm decisions and see them implemented, listen to our members and take a step back to follow their path and dreams.
Why did I do it? Because I am not easily scared of challenges. Because I believe I will learn more in the next year than probably in the five following. Because the message and motive of @ inspires me more than anything else has so far. Because I am happy to contribute to something bigger than myself and because I feel that I will make friends for life. As I've mentioned in my speech, I want the LC Zurich to be the best, stay the best and to keep improving through innovation and trusted leadership. This we can only do together and I am hoping that you know your importance as @-members, the foundation of @, the stones the walls of our house are made of. I‘m looking forward to the journey we are embarking on and I want to assure you of my loyalty to our LC Zürich. (Even if our Leo and Marmita are married now! Love conquers all but not rivalry between Geneva and Zurich! :D )

Anne-Sophie Chiarello

Albert Gubler - VPTM 10/11

My name is Albert Gubler, I'm 20 years old and I study Economics at the University of Zurich. I play a lot of football in my free time and am interested in a lot of sports in general. A ball is enough to keep me occupied for hours. I also enjoy movies, TV shows and books, as well as wasting time surfing the internet.

But if I was granted unlimited resources, I'd be travelling around the world. My AIESEC experience so far consists of being a member of the OGX team and taking part in their activities, such as organizing an induction event and raising awareness at the Activity Fair of the Federal Institute of Technology.

I was elected Vice President Talent Management, or as we call it VP TM. My job will be to take care of the recruitment, the marketing and the development of the AIESEC members. I hope to continue the good work that has been done so far, but also improve the recruiting at the Federal Institute of Technology as well as in the faculties of the University where @ isn't well known yet. I'd like the LCMs to be insightful and entertaining, and a date all members look forward to.

I really enjoy being a part of AIESEC and I want to get the most out of it. It's a valuable opportunity for me to gain leadership experience, to work with a young team and to meet a lot of new, interesting people. LC Zurich has a goal of being excellent and I just want to contribute to this goal. But most importantly I think I'm going to have a great time and a lot of fun this next year, which is my main motivation and also my personal goal.

Albert Gubler

Nadine Engbersen - VPX 10/11

I am Nadine Engbersen and I already mentioned that I’m studying communications, but during my speech I hadn’t enough time to explain why. I choose this field, because it was the only one that had (almost) no mathematics, acquired no Latinum and which I could imagine myself working in and after all, it seemed to be exciting and it is. Furthermore, I am a rather shy and sometimes very sarcastic person, at times I’m very well organized, I love my friends, socializing, Photography and travelling.

I was confronted with AIESEC for the first time, during the most boring lecture of my studies, which might be the reason why I actually listened to the one who did the lecture shout. I joined AIESEC because I realized that I finally found what I was secretly looking for. A cool student organization with a high rate of internationality that did not only offer the chance to go abroad but also gave their members the unique opportunity of developing themselves on a free basis.
From March on I will be the VPX of our lovely LC. The whole LC and especially the EB 10/11 has one dream – to win the AIESEC Olympics. My personal strategy is to promote AIESEC more at the ETH and we still haven’t yet reached every corner of the University to spread the knowledge about what AIESEC offers and how we can easily help to realize dreams. Besides that, I want to set value on raising internships and to stay in contact with every company we've ever had an EP in.
My personal aim during my term as a VPX is not only to increase our exchange rates and be as good as my predecessor, but I also want to enjoy my term, learn as much as I can, take the advantages and opportunities that AIESEC offers me, make the best out of it and have a great team, a great time and lots of laughs and good times to remember.

Nadine Engbersen

Where oldies meet newies... Alumni Round Table

Every months the @-alumni of Zurich meet for a round table at Paddy Reilly‘s, an Irish pub in the heart of Zurich where the smell of beer mingles with happy chit-chat. This 3rd December two tables were not enough and we found ourselves happily cramed together, switching places to talk to new arrivals.

These round tables are an opportunity for our alumni to meet up again, busy with their working lives. Some of the guests were never members of the LC Zurich but rather another LC in Switzerland or Germany. The @-spirit is very much around and as we all have something in common, it is easy to approach people I didn‘t know before. Therefore, I am happy to announce that I met the mother of Marmita. She was very sad to hear the news of her baby being wed to our Leo, unfortunatelly the LC Geneva had not invited her to the wedding.
During the round table I met many alumni of our LC and it was great to see their interest and passion for @. It's one of my goals to bring the two circles together in the near future. Many of our alumni would love to get to know the current LC better and I‘m sure we can oblige them with an opportunity. I've seldomly met such open-minded, experienced people willing to share their knowledge. Anyone is welcome to join for one of these alumni round-tables. The next one will probably be held in mid-January. Just contact me for further infos.

Anne-Sophie Chiarello

Santa Claus at University - This must be LC Zurich's Christmas event!

When you see suspicious people running around with red blankets around their shoulders or who look like dangerous gangsters, then this can only mean one thing: LC Zurich is celebrating Christmas (with Darren a.k.a. Santa Claus and Adrian a.k.a. the evil “Schmutzli”)! This year, our traditional Christmas get-together took place at the university and thus gave us the opportunity not only to enjoy some snacks and drinks in a cosy atmosphere, but also to have an interesting programme:

Our newies were officially declared members of AIESEC and got their member certificate, after having successfully passed a quiz on all the various abbreviations at @ (and paid their member fee, of course ;-) ). Afterwards, Vali, our new intern from Romania, presented herself and her country with a funny video and shared some tasty Romanian pancakes with us! Thanks again :-)!

The main part of the evening though was the award show, which rewarded various members of LC Zurich for their extraordinary work in AIESEC. Here are the glorious winners:

Julien Weber was rewarded for being the Most Diligent Member of AIESEC Zurich. Although being a member for only three months, he already showed great interest and put a lot of effort into AIESEC.

Anabel Gaetan won the Honorary Member Award. Being an AIESEC member in her home country Argentina, Anabel spent six months here as an OGX team leader and will participate in the transition phase as well.

Sarah Wiederkehr was rewarded for being an outstanding Key Account Manager Role Model. Most of us are still jealous of the four- kilograms Toblerone chocolate bar she got…;)

Valérie Kuhn and Tony Kümin stood out as Zurich’s Most Valuable Members of AIESEC. Valerie’s great engagement, overall in education management, resulted in a raise of several high class external workshops. Tony’s proactive thinking and IT know-how contributed a lot to AIESEC’s development so far.

Nadja Zürcher was rewarded for her outstanding and straight forward networking abilities and therefore received the Best Networker Award.

Marc Alesch won the glorious Rising Phoenix Award, being a committed and proactive AIESEC member, whom the LC expects to overtrump himself even more.

Marcel Sprecher, Sebastian Rode, Philipp Heller, Jih-Ming Chen and Marc Schamaun got the Most Golden Goldie Award. Being former members of LC Zurich for one or even several years, those guys are still showing a great extent of commitment and engagement in the LC.

Once again, congratulations to all the winners and thank you for your effort! And also, a big thank you for those who organised this Christmas event! Now everyone’s hopefully in the right mood to enjoy the holidays – so Merry Christmas and a happy new year to all of you!

Alona Marchukova

More pictures...

IBM Mentoring Training

December 3^rd - A new mission on AIESEC's way of developing its members' leadership potential was fulfilled. Thanks to our partner IBM, about 40 AIESECers, hungry for knowledge, could enjoy about six hours of high-class mentoring training, delivered by the two IBM-coaches Jean-Mark and Heig. A small theoretical introduction, followed by a lot of interactive exercises and soon a new generation of mentors was born.

What is your goal? What are you trying to achieve? And how do you think you will achieve it These where the essential questions of the day. While facing these questions and using IBM's “G.R.O.W.”-model, we could not only learn how to help each other while supporting the goal setting. Even more important where the small things we were able to improve: how to listen to each other, how to understand other people and how to give positive feedback.

After this intensive experience, five members of AIESEC Zurich can bring tons of new gained wisdom into our LC. And who knows, maybe next time there will be even more of us who benefit from this great possibility of self-development.

Patrick Mann

New Interns in Town

Yet another month has passed and we're finding ourselfs in December already. As time flies, interns come and go without many uf us realizing... We just had a farewell drink with Dominique, David and Nick - our 3 lovely Citi interns that we are going to miss a lot - and already new ones have arrived. This weekend Valeria from Romania and Panos from Greece found their way to Zurich. Both of them will be working for Kraft Foods and are eager to getting to know LC Zurich's local reality and the people behind email addresses. They have reassured to come to our Klaus-Event this Sunday and will even bring something special from their country! :-) The small group who helped them with legal matters already enjoyed their company while drinking coffee and chatting. Sure enough both of them already feel welcomed and integrated by now.

Tanja Vogel

LC Zurich X-Mas-Dinner on December 6th

On December 6^th, LC Zurich is inviting their members and interns to a pre-Christmas event! It is not going to be a lame dinner in a fancy restaurant but a cultural mix of Swiss and international specialities at university. Besides a lot of food and christmas music there is going to be a foto-diashow of everything that has happened during this year so far. Our interns arriving in one week will introduce themselves and our lovely new members will finally get their member certificate! The TM-Team has also prepared something special to reward outstanding members. So please reserve the date and enjoy with us the Christmas atmosphere in an AIESEC surrounding

;-)

Tanja Vogel

Living Diversity and Intercultural Exchange: AIESEC Zurich meets Hochschule Lucerne

Today, Anabel and Corina went to the Cultural X-Plosion event which took place at the Hochschule Lucerne. The event consisted in a get-together of people from all over the world who represented their countries. Some of them even prepared a typical dance or played a special instrument and students could taste typical food as well. In addition to that, information about cultural shock, internationalization and cultural awareness was provided and a presentation about cultural experiences was held.
We, as AIESECers, could not miss this event in order to promote the opportunty to go abroad. Students were generally interested in our program and we hope that many of them will take the chance to go on an internship with AIESEC. Moreover, we showed that AIESEC offers a wide range of options that are for sure not coverd by other organizations.

Anabel Gaetán and Corina Binz

LC Zurich Newsletter

AIESEC Zurich members from now on have the great pleasure to receive a monthly newsletter created by the marketing team. Thanks to this innovative communication tool, the LC is always informed about upcoming events, opportunities within and outside AIESEC and interesting stories concerning career and intercultural learning, amongst others.

Corina Binz

Discovering Leadership Skills

Have you ever thought about leading a team meeting effectively? Do you know what the difference between a manager and a leader is? And what about a helpful checklist with useful points to prepare a meeting?

In our last LC meeting, we had the chance to learn more about all those points and could see that a combination of manager and leadership skills is the best way in order to lead a team successfully. This means that doing the things right is as important as doing the right things. Valérie explained us the importance of individual consideration, intellectual stimulation, inspirational motivation and idealized influence in a leadership position. But not only the theoretical aspect was part of the training. We could also follow the presentations of Benjamin and Darren, who shared with us their leadership experience within AIESEC. Moreover, a discussion about planing and realizing a meeting showed us how to transfer our knowledge into praxis. By the way, the two checklists “How do I lead a team?” and “How do I organize a meeting?” can be obtained by our education manager Valérie.

Corina Binz

Fiesch: Do-It Swiss National Conference 2009

“Best conference I have ever been to!” This is probably the most frequent answer you get when you ask about how the Aiesecers feel about the Do-It conference 2009 in Fiesch. And it doesn’t matter whether you ask experienced members or Newies, the enthusiasm is enormous!

From November 12^th – 15^th, about 400 young national and international delegates spent four days working on the integration of the Newies and the development of the experienced members, partying and just enjoying the AIESEC culture together.

Here are some impressions:

"I came to the conference with a very wrong image. Conference - I connected this word to work or learning and my first thoughts were “Oh my god, why do I have to do this?”. There was work and learning at the conference, especially the 4 hours AIESEC XP block was a hard piece of work and there were many things to learn. To be honest, most of the Newies (me included) must have been too tired to actually realize what they were doing.

The workshops were great as well. I was really surprised that there was almost no sleeping-potential in any of the ones I attended. Considering the amount of sleep I – and obviously the others as well – had the nights before, the enthusiasm of the Aiesecers and the attention paid to the leaders of the workshops was amazingly high (Although the leaders might not always have recognized that, due to their own amount of alcohol in their blood :-) ).

That’s another point: the enthusiasm. On Friday morning when I took my seat at the morning plenary, my first thought was “What the hell are those people doing there, dancing on the stage? Are they crazy?” No. They’re not. It would be stupid to agree, because after the second morning I was one of those crazy people. After all, I learned that this early dancing

is way more effective than drinking liters of coffee.

And last but not least, there was the Global Village. I couldn’t really imagine anything when somebody tried to explain me what Global Village was. An exchange of local food and drinks? Cool. It was even cooler than I thought. There’s no way to describe Global Village

to those who weren’t there. I’m sorry. Come and join the next time!

To finish this short article, I want to answer the question I asked myself in the first paragraph. Why was I at the conference? Not only to live the spirit of an AIESEC conference but also to understand why 400 people throw themselves simultaneously to the floor after somebody shouted “Space Grenade…!!”, to give and get sugarcubes, the AIESEC way of saying ‘thank you for this great time!’ and after all, to do some NETWORKING… ;-)" (Nadine)

"Four days in Fiesch with four hundred young adults result in a lot of fun.

That's the most important lesson I learned during my first conference as an AIESEC member. After arriving with a sense of nervousness and excitement, we were thrown into the cold water during an opening plenary, where all the values and themes of the conference were on full display. The following party just showed that AIESEC took their motto "Work hard, party harder" seriously. True enough, the next three days were mostly insightful, sometimes stressful, boring at moments, but definitely always tiring. The nights on the other hand... well I think the pictures speak for themselves.

At the end of the conference I left for Zurich with quite a few memories and acquaintances. And now, I'm looking forward to Kick-off, which will be organised by Zurich and therefore can only be just as exciting as Do-It!" (Albert)

"One year later, after Do-It 08 where I was a Newie, I came back to Fiesch for Do-It 09! My expectations were not too high. After three national conferences you know how it works and you're familiar with the AIESEC culture. But I was looking forward to learn new things and meet new people - especially our Newies!

After the first evening, I already felt that there was this special spirit in the air I only felt during my first conference, which was unforgettable.

But what impressed me the most were our Newies! They were so motivated and really understood the AIESEC way of enjoying conferences - thank you guys!! I'm looking forward to work with you and I'm proud to be a part of the best Delegation 09!! I'll keep Do-It 09 in good memory as a great conference with a lot of fun, fantastic parties and many interesting sessions and workshops! The last thing I would like to mention is the OC - THANK YOU so much! You did a great job - this conference exceeded all my expectations I ever had!" (Valérie)

"Do It 2009 was my third national conference and I have to say that it was the best one I've ever been to! Why? Because of the great workshops + delegates, because of LC Zurich Space Grenade + Let's do it Let's do it, because of the parties and nordic circles and also because of an AMAZING OC, Facis and sweet sugar cubes!" (Tanja)

"After my first conference experience at „do it!“ 2009 I have to agree with what most people say: @ers are crazy people. They laugh more and more loudly than anyone else, they have the evolutionary advantage of being active in sessions, party all night, live without sleep and still be active and motivated the next morning. It has made me very proud to be part of this @ family. And as kick off is coming soon, I‘m sure the OC will kick a**! and we‘ll help them to make it even more legendary than do it 09. Thanks to everyone who made do it such an amazing experience!" (Anne-Sophie)

Thank you very much for all those who contributed to the organisation and realization of the conference – you really DID IT! ;-)

Alona Marchukova

Swiss Dinner at Zeughauskeller

As a new kind of SOcial Activity (SOA) the IM-Team made a reservation at Zeughausekeller with the goal to have a nice time and get to know each other a little better. The restaurant is very well known for its traditional Swiss Food, which offered a good chance for our recently arrived Interns to try it.

We were about 10 people and seated comfortably at a table in the back part of the restaurant. Everybody tried something else, reaching from "Zürigschnetzlets" and Cordon Bleue to Rösti and Tortelloni while Tony, Michael P. and Savvas each devoured a huuuge Wienerschnitzel! (...see photo 2)

We enjoyed the company of Olga, one of the new interns, and some Newies while eating the delicious food and laughing at lot (not at the same time, for anyone wondering if someone choke :P). Unfortunately nobody brought a camera, so we took pictures with an iPhone and some less adequate phones – works too I guess ;-P.

After dinner, we decided to move on and have a drink in a bar. The decision was made fast – Newsbar. There we drank a beer, talked about FC Vaduz, queen Elizabeth and about the stars in the universe meanwhile letting a peaceful evening end. The evening was a new experience which we plan to repeat in the foreseeable future.

Tanja / Tony

Lost son of LC Zurich found in GENEVA!

We look back on March 2009: In order that all new elected EBs of AIESEC in Switzerland can start their term, the lovely OC team with OCP Rebekka and OC Jennifer, Sarah, Franca, Valérie and Thomas organized the Transition Conference in rural Lucerne. Not just with their amazing cooking skills, but also with showing great performance of LC Zurich they facilitated us, the EB 09/10, a wonderful and smooth start into the term! With a certificate we wanted to thank them – unfortunately at that time Thomas, the only man in the OC, was already disappeared and the certificate had to lie around more than half a year in a dusty drawer of the LC office …

Good times: Transition Conference March 09

… until Thomas has been found again, in Geneva where he is continuing his studies, far away from his home LC. The chance had to be used and finally we could thank Thomas for his support and great job during the Transition conference!! All attempts were in vain to get him back to Zurich; Hania, the LCP of LC Geneva, and her team, need him in their Local Committee now.

We wish Thomas all the best for his studies and for his internship plans this winter, and hope that he won’t forget his home LC in far Zurich. He will be back here around December 5th for his exams … so everyone who wants to use this chance to catch up with him, don’t miss this chance:-)

Adrian