Jul 30, 2009

My first blog post

This blog is a way for me to share my experiences of being the Local Committee President (LCP) of AIESEC Victoria. For this post I will explain what AIESEC is and the crazy things you get to do as an LCP.

AIESEC is one of the best kept secrets out there--at least in Canada. It’s an organization of post-secondary students and recent graduates with chapters in 107 countries and 1700 universities. And it’s been around for 61 years. 51 years in Canada. And over 20 years in Victoria. Between all these chapters, or local committees as we like to call it, we run a global internship program. Each chapter finds companies to hire AIESEC students or recent grads and in exchange, each chapter recruits students or recent grads to go on these internships. AIESEC has over 5,500 international internships each year.

By running the global internship program, each student member gets practical, professional experience. In Canada, each of our local committees are divided into 6 teams, or portfolios as we call them: Talent Management (HR), Corporate Relations (sales and marketing of incoming exchanges), Alumni Relations, Communications, Outgoing Exchange and Finance. In addition to these experiences, we occasionally have opportunities to participate on organizing committees that run conferences, career fairs, corporate breakfasts, alumni dinners and so on.

And as an LCP, I get the role of overseeing all these activities in my local committee. In addition, add on managing our Board of Advisors, participating in National Legislation, communicating with the National Committee, University Relations and just overall, being an Ambassador of AIESEC. It’s a challenging role, but also fun and rewarding. If there was one job out there that I would do for free, this would be it. Oh, wait a second--I am doing this for free.

Stay tuned for my next post—“Why it’s cool to be an LCP”.

More about AIESEC: www.aiesec.org, www.aiesec.ca, www.aiesec.ca/victoria, www.twitter.com/aiesecvictoria