IAESTE UK Team win First Prize Again!

Over 240 delegates from 80 IAESTE member countries attended the 59th Annual IAESTE Conference which took place in Lisbon, Portugal between 19 and 26 January. In the run-up to the conference the UK programme officers in Belfast, Edinburgh and London secured a record 228 offers of placements for science and engineering students to come to the UK to work in industry, research organisations and universities.

At the conference, IAESTE UK offers of training were exchanged with 67 countries. The main exchange partners in 2007 were Germany, Poland and Switzerland. Some of the more exotic placements received included industrial design placements in China and Mexico, biomedical engineering in Uzbekistan, biology offers in countries as diverse as Ecuador, Mongolia and Tajikistan, and engineering ones in Botswana, Ghana, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania.

To top off a very successful conference, for the second year in a row the IAESTE UK team won the ‘Administrators of the Year Award' for their work in managing the programme. To have won the award twice in a row sets our programme as the benchmark against which other IAESTE organisations must measure their performance.

The Award is based on a quality assurance evaluation carried out by peers, namely IAESTE partner organisations in over 80 countries. The evaluation assesses performance throughout the programme's administrative cycle and touches on items such as meeting deadlines, communicating effectively and on time, and the quality of candidates and placement offers. The team were amazed to win the award for a second time – now all that remains it to make it a hat trick in 2008!

For more information on IAESTE UK events please email Bruce Wicks or call 0207 389 4114.