Elections 2026-2027

Dear fellow (TiSEM) student,

For the past 30 years, we have represented your voice in the TiSEM Faculty Council. In the past years, focus has mainly been given to the following topics: Career Development, Quality of Education and Student Welfare. These overarching focus areas have provided a solid base for the many positive changes, innovations and solutions that have been found in the previous years. Below, we used these focus areas to summarize our party program for the elections of the upcoming academic year with even more new ideas and aspirations in order to improve your student life at TiSEM.

 

Career Development

For both students and the faculty, Career Development is an important topic. For students, we want to provide good job perspectives and improve connection with the labour market, such that everyone can reach their full potential. Also, we want to make sure that companies highly value TiSEM students as their (future) employees. For these reasons, Career Development has always been one of our main areas of focus, and it will again be next year, but from a slightly different perspective.

The past years, the focus has mostly been on improving the collaboration and regulations between (study) associations and the faculty with regards to career events organized by these associations. The main goal was to make sure students are able to visit the different career events, without missing any lectures. It is safe to say that we are much closer to this goal with the new regulation, proposed by ECCO, in which all TiSEM master programs have no lectures during the company days of the EBT, the biggest career event for TiSEM students.

However, we feel like there is still so much more to gain when it comes to providing information and developing skills to use in your career orientation process. There are many things that you need to know about, for example, the labour market, job interviews and especially about yourself, before you are able to become a good applicant. Many students barely get in touch with this during their studies and do not know where and how to start their orientation- and/or application process when they start looking for a job or internship. TiSEM already has some really great facilities for students to use, specifically TiSEM Career Services. In order to tackle the problem mentioned above, we want to offer these existing facilities to the student more actively, for instance by exploring different opportunities to integrate them into the different study programs. Examples of this integration are the possibility of more information sessions, career guidance, guest lectures and even workshops.

In this way, we believe that students can get the right information at the right time, in order to prepare themselves optimally for their future career and all the different career events they are now able to attend. We believe that this will also help students that want to do an internship or have a part-time job during their studies.

Quality of Education

Quality of education is a topic that, we believe, is highly important. Together with conducting high-quality research, delivering high-quality education to its students should always be one of the main focus points of the faculty. This is important, since we want the young professionals that the faculty delivers to have the best academic background possible. Quality of education has always been one of the core interests of student party ECCO and will, of course, remain the same in the upcoming academic year.

Over the past few years, ECCO has been able to hand in multiple valuable initiatives in order to improve the quality of education at our faculty. Three prime examples of this are the proposals on both the Last Chance Regulation, Video Lectures, and the Uniformization of the Syllabus. With the proposal on the Last Chance Regulation, ECCO managed to accomplish a new set of rules that allows students with only one open course left to make use of a third exam possibility in order to complete this final and last course. The proposal on Video Lectures was received well by the faculty council. It ensured that all professors and teachers started assessing the different possibilities for the incorporation of video lectures within their course. With the proposal for the uniformization of the syllabuses our aim is to ensure that all students have the right information and expectations of their courses before they start.

For the coming years, we identify two main opportunities with regards to improving the quality of education. First, we see that society is rapidly changing. For a university with the motto “Understanding Society”, it is important to follow those societal changes, also on the faculty level. We would like to make sure that the different study programs are and remain aligned with the economy and business world. Second, we believe that further digitization of education would be really valuable for the faculty. The increase in the amount of video lectures, partly initiated by the proposal mentioned above, is a good start in this regard. However, we believe that there is still a lot more to explore. In the foreseeable future, we would like to see a faculty where blended learning, a style of education in which students learn via electronic and online media as well as traditional face-to-face teaching, is the standard, rather than the exemption.

All in all, we aim to combine the successes from the past with optimal exploration of opportunities that the future will provide us with, in order to provide all TiSEM students with the best education possible.

Student Welfare

Student welfare is a topic that is becoming increasingly important. More often, students experience high amounts of stress related to their studies and their student life. Even though this is something that should mainly be dealt with on a central level, the faculty can definitely do its part in helping students to deal with problems that might occur.

In the past, ECCO arranged that for TiSEM students, there will be no forced additional costs on cases and software licenses. Besides this, we see it as a positive fact that TiSEM is the first faculty with a mentoring program for all first year students. Also, ECCO has always been in close contact with the different associations attached to the faculty in order to identify student welfare related problems that bigger groups of students deal with.

For next year, our main goal with regards to student welfare is getting more value out of the mentoring program that is currently in place: PASS, the Program for Academic Study Success. As mentioned above, we think it is really good that the faculty has a mentoring program. However, we believe that the outcomes of this program can be exploited more efficiently. For example, it could be valuable to track which problems multiple students encounter. By doing so, we would be able to solve those issues for the whole group of students and prevent them from occurring again in next academic years.

Keeping the close contact with the different student bodies of the faculty in place and making sure that the PASS mentoring program and its outcomes are exploited optimally will both help ECCO to continuously identify and, eventually, solve problems with regards to the welfare of TiSEM students.

Apply to join ECCO!

Hopefully, you agree with us on how much value and potential all of these goals and ideas have for the faculty and specifically for students.

If you want to join ECCO next academic year to work together on achieving these goals and ideas, please send your motivation letter (1 page) and CV to our e-mail: in**@st**************.nl

Deadline is February 21 2026, 12:00 am.