The last pizza session with the current batch of EIT Digital Master School students in the Netherlands, took place in the Co-location Centre Eindhoven, 5th of June. The theme was focused on ‘careers’, because that day the career event ‘BoostIQ’ was organised at the High Tech Campus during business hours. And most of the Master School students visited this career event. In the slipstream of BoostIQ, our Co-location Centre Manager, Erwin van Eijden, gave a presentation on how to set-up a curriculum vitae.
And as it takes: after the food for thought, it is time for pizza. Nonetheless the fun, these pizza sessions are important to network with each other, and are at the same time a quick and informal catch up. It appears also an occasion to share experiences that by the way can end up as a success story as written below.
The story of Borce Stojkovski and BestGraduates
Back in autumn 2014, at the University of Twente, Borce was approached by a promoter who was looking for international students to sign up for the competition Best Graduates which is an exclusive recruitment game for national and international technical master students.
In a nutshell, BestGraduates is organized in collaboration with Dutch top companies who nominate their candidates for the competition finals. In the International Student Edition, three Dutch companies participated this year: ASML, TNO and Philips. Around 1.200 students participated, out of which 500 were from the International Edition. Borce ended up as one of the 10 nominees invited to the International Student Edition Finals on 22 May.
The finals consisted of three challenges, including a business case from the Boston Consulting Group on developing a market entry strategy for a Dutch startup manufacturing small wind turbines. At the end of the competition, Borce was ranked 5th overall, but he was awarded the 1st prize from Philips as their best candidate. The prize is a coaching session with the CEO, Frans van Houten!
Borce says: “As I already have my own company, getting a job was not my main motivation when signing up for this competition. I guess it was more the challenge to participate in such a context among top students, learn more about the participating companies, make contacts and gain a new experience. It turned out very well in the end, and I am also very happy about the prize as it will give me an opportunity to meet Mr van Houten and enjoy the privilege to receive coaching and leadership advice from him.”
‘ITS in your pocket’
Another nice representative story that illustrated that EIT Digital Master School students like to get challenged is the ITS in Your Pocket 2014, the 1st European Intelligent Transport Systems app competition in Helsinki, Finland. This contest provides an opportunity for companies, teams and individuals to learn more about intelligent traffic systems from the best experts in the field.
In Spring 2014, a team of EIT Digital Master School students consisting of Borce Stojkovski, Luca Pesavento and Dimitrios Tsiodoulos who all studied at Univeristy Paris-Sud, decided to participate in this contest. And…they were rather successful as they were awarded with a special prize from AppCampus, a joint program by Aalto University and Microsoft, for their project OTRIP/Tripster.io.
Tripster.io is envisioned as an app that puts sharable journeys at the forefront of the user experience ultimately changing how people arrange and travel with friends. It represents journeys as interactive objects that travellers can interact with, so to be able to save recently searched itineraries, sync them on many devices, send them to other people, share them with multiple travellers in real-time, as well as to explore route alternatives on-the-fly. This way public transportation becomes a social experience, where planning and getting to a meeting i.e. destination alone or with others will become easier and faster.
Currently Tripster.io is on hiatus, as the students are all wrapping up their master studies and finishing the internships. However, this summer, the three of them plan to sit down together, and decide whether to reboot the project.
About Borce
Borce Stojkovski comes from Croatia. He completed his primary and secondary education in Macedonia, and obtained a BSc in Software and Information Engineering from the Vienna University of Technology. Now he is a second-generation student of the EIT Digital Master School Human-Computer Interaction and Design track. Borce joined the EIT Digital community at the University of Paris-Sud in 2013. He is currently doing his final graduation project at the University of Twente in cooperation with the Enschede-based company RE-liON in the domain of realistic training of rescue and military service personnel in virtual reality environments.
