Extending the sweet spot for the Student Board
As Chair of the EDUC Student Board, Hikmet Güler, represents more than 200.000 students. He’s busy laying the foundation to integrate the student’s voice as one of the pillars of our Alliance.
Hikmet Hilmi Güler and the rest of the EDUC Student Governing Board was elected 28 August, marking an important milestone for our student community.
Quite natural
To very shortly summarize, his educational background/training is in Politics & Public Administration & Design Thinking, and he is working in the Energy & Renewables sector, while previously working in career & counselling, consulting and management. He also has a fair amount of exposure and experience in the executive side of things in his previous engagements.
Being part of the EDUC Project for some time, Güler had joined many discussions and felt that it came quite natural for him to put his candidacy for the Chair role.
"Having a competent and engaged Student Board is a crucial pull factor. Knowing my fellow SB Members personally, I was confident in our capacity – to plan, work, and create together. On the other hand, it was the close and mutually supportive relationship that we had long established with the EDUC Management that also gave me the certainty for a constructive and forward-looking shared effort," - he says.
Working it out
In your vision, what are the primary goals and aims for the EDUC Alliance Student Board during your term?
"I see this year at the Student Board to be the time to lay a strong foundation. A foundation that ensures the integration of our Board as one of the pillars of EDUC – representing our more than 200.000 student body collectively and contributing to the strategy and steering of EDUC Alliance."
How do you plan to strengthen the connection between the SB and the general EDUC Governance?
"We have defined our procedures and set our guiding document – the SB Charter. Yet, it is one thing to define and describe actions, and another thing to actually work them out. So that’s one of the things we’re primarily focused on right now, meaning, we are having discussions with each and every partner university and their administrations to make sure that the participation in our Student Board is on a democratic basis."
Interest and capacity
Reflecting on the past year, what key accomplishments has the Student Board achieved under your leadership?
"The Student Board has become an integral element in the governance of EDUC, thanks to both our efforts and certainly also to the general EDUC Administration. It is crucial that we develop and establish routines on the synergies that we initiated within & between the Alliance structures. We are currently establishing this with the many set touchpoints, connecting our board with the local project coordination and management, the task-level, to the administrative & steering level. With this structure, we also make sure that our board members are able to extend the sweet spot between interest and capacity for their own engagement."