A board year at Aureus with Sarah Schleeper

Step aboard! Aureus is recruiting for members of the 71th Aureus board. Are you wondering what it’s like to manage Aureus? Where will you spend your time on? Read the testimonials of our previous board members to find out more. Today, Sarah Schleeper (Career Officer in 2015/2016) is sharing her experience with us. 

The first time I got familiar with Aureus was during the juniors study trip to London in my first year, after that crazy weekend I decided to apply for active membership! However, I wasn’t accepted.. So, I got into this faculty association via another route, namely as a participant of the Amsterdam Research Project (ARP) to India in my third year. During this year, I got to know Aureus from another point of view and got very enthusiastic to become a board member one day! The idea of being responsible for all the strategic choices concerned with satisfying over 4000 students and work on those needs together with all those hard working 180 active members seemed really cool to me.

And so I applied for the Aureus board of 2015-2016 and ended up having a year in a rollercoaster together with one girl and six guys (no clue how I survived that part haha). During this year I was Career Officer of Aureus, which basically means I was responsible for all the big career events such as the Business Experience Days and Amsterdamse Carrière Dagen. Thereby, I was involved a lot in acquisition, human resources and marketing (together with the Commercial, HR and Marketing Officer) as well. This is something I really liked about my function, being involved with managing big projects from beginning, thus the HR for example, till the end, the Marketing strategy. This made it possible for me to learn many different things across several fields and get to know myself working in these different settings!

Apart from managing these big projects on the “outside” there is also a big part going on behind the scenes, thus on the “inside”, once you are a board member. That part is concerned with the strategic choices I was talking about earlier. A few clear and straightforward examples of those is that we implemented a new rebranding and website during our board year. These two projects include many small and big steps such as finding the right partner to work with according to a certain budget, but also choosing which buttons are needed in the main menu on the website! These projects make you learn how to discuss such strategic issues together with your fellow board members and together decide on how to execute the final ideas in a smooth way!

Next to all these serious learning aspects, a board year at Aureus is mostly also having a lot of fun in a social manner! Think of monthly drinks, an active member weekend, attending COBO’s from other associations throughout the country, going on study trips, and of course building an extensively large network full of recruiters at companies you might want to work at and alumni that are in cool jobs already and are always willing to help you!

Not convinced yet? You can learn about the experiences of other (previous) board members by sending an e-mail to [email protected].