Thoughts on Launching an Academic Community
I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of ‘community’. I am reminded that when I moved from Northern California to Germany ten years ago, the differences in traditions, cultures, and social systems were readily apparent. I had moved from San Jose, a city of close to one million Silicon Valley citizens, to Nehren, a village of just over 2000 Swabian souls. I had changed careers from being a high-tech industry executive to being an international business professor.
I was faced with very new feelings about community and personal responsibility. I was energized by the thrill and challenge of learning another language and trying to succeed in a ‘foreign’ environment. I enjoyed teaching my business students with new personal insight that they enter each host country with genuine social responsibility in mind and with their clear, non-patronizing message of value-oriented contribution to the host society readily at-hand.
I also appreciated the rich dialogue with professors and students from all over the world that I met on our campus or on theirs. There is something special about the academic world that had been missing from my professional sphere. Today, with the responsibility of introducing the University Alliances Community (UAC), I have similar positive feelings of anticipation.
I am encouraged that we can engage with each other in career-developing opportunities through rich dialogue and value-oreinted contributions in this community. I invite you to bookmark our UA Welcome Center where you will find an invitation to register for the UAC. Please also subscribe to this UA Message Board to keep yourself up-to-date on UAC developments and to participate regularly as a ‘communiy activist’.
One thing that I can think of that can make this University Alliance very strong would be an SAP/ERP student organization. I have not heard of a student group like this before, but there could be one out there already. If anyone knows of student group similar to this, I would be very interested to learn more about them.
A nationwide (or even worldwide) student organization would give students a chance to collaborate and make their SAP experiences in the classroom even better. Employers could benefit by having a student organization to identify as producing great SAP talent. SAP could even benefit by the positive press from hosting events such as conferences, case competitions, and more.
I personally would love to be a part of starting a student organization like that here at Grand Valley State University. We have a strong MIS program and ERP Initiative that supports SAP courses. I know our faculty and students here would be supportive of a student organization like this. We have a good-sized group of students that are in either their second or third year of school that really want to learn about SAP.
Your words are music to our ears here in SAP University Alliances. Our interests lie in support of high education, and that means anticipating and meeting the skills development needs of today's web-savvy generation of university-goers.
We spend most all of our time outfitting professors with the software solutions, hosting access, and course materials to allow students to receive an enriched academic experience. Grand Valley State University and our main contact there, Prof. Simha Magal, are perfect examples of how SAP can work successfully with universities. We want to continue with our interactions with professors. But clearly, the ultimate audience is students like yourself.
We were hoping that the new University Alliances Community (UAC) would provide a special link for us to engage with you, and we are grateful to see such a suggestion in the first few days after our site has gone live. We will discuss the idea of promoting campus student associations, and we will keep you in the loop as we do. We will also take you up on your offer to help initiate this, as we clearly would need you to tell us what students are thinking and expecting.
We will contact you by email this week.
Both Eric Koch and I are members of SAM-I (Society for the Advancement of Management and International Business) which has provided us a great experience collaborating with students from different majors across our business school. This March our SAM-I chapter is going to Las Vegas to compete in the 25th annual SAM National case competition. It would be awesome if SAP could host some type of competition that would be more specific to our major. In addition, our local chapter of SAM-I co-hosts the Seidmen ERP Speaker series with Dr. Simha R. Magal’s ERP Initiative. The Seidmen ERP Speaker Series brings in top executives to talk about their experiences in the industry, last year Mr. Jeff Word (Vice President of Product Strategy for SAP Labs, the product development division of SAP AG) was one of our speakers. If a new organization was started, this speaker series would have an easy transition to this new group.
Many GVSU students are starting to see the value in understanding SAP, and the great opportunities it provides after college. The Seidmen ERP Initiative at GVSU is gaining strength with more students taking ERP curriculum and finding other ways to get more involved. A student organization would only further develop our skills and prepare us for the next stage in our careers. Because of the strong student support, I know we could hit the ground running. Moreover, our professor’s are extremely supportive and would help guide us is in the right direction. I would be honored to help start up a local chapter, especially with my colleague Eric Koch.
To get started, you should join together and ask your student senate, board, council, etc. for guidelines on establishing a new student-led organization. Maybe you can find this information on the web already. This will be helpful for us in creating a template for GVSU and similar initiatives on other campuses.
You should also start asking around and promoting the idea to more students, because you probably need a petition of many signatures to present to the student senate organizations committee to get their go-ahead. Normally, they also provide some activity funding.
I feel compelled to respond to my own blog from over a half year ago.
UA has always been a special community of people. Even before we were connected through URL's and email protocols and started using the UA name, we had members employing SAP solutions innovatively in classrooms and labs.
The University Alliances community (UAC) portal, provides a platform for connecting the members of the community in a very dynamic, social media environment.
We all here appreciate that the UA community of people came first, and motivated the implementation of the UAC portal.
Thank you to you all for your impressive engagement.
Bob