Leeds Beckett Students Shine in Porto

The conference was held at ISLA Instituto Politécnico de Gestão de Tecnologia in Vila Nova de Gaia, south of the Douro River. The university itself is a fascinating creative space, housed in a building that was once a shopping mall, with working escalators between floors, with the shop units being repurposed as classrooms and lecture theatres.

The theme of the conference was employability and getting students to think reflectively about their past and strategically about their futures, to best prepare themselves whilst at university for the world of work and professional development beyond formal education.

The conference was attended by 74 students from nine countries across the EU and beyond. The students participated in several academic, vocational and intercultural activities. The conference program included a first day tasting event, where students brought food from their own countries for others to try as well as a treasure hunt around the city of Porto.

The academic program included lectures and seminars about employability skills development, intercultural communication, emotional intelligence, reflection and resilience. This included a special guest lecture by Kateryna Skyba from Khmelnytskyi National University in Ukraine about adaptability and resilience in times of crisis.

Students worked in international teams on an experiential learning project on the theme of sustainable tourism in Porto and became tourists themselves with an organised boat trip along the Douro River.

MBA student attendee Lavanya Dasari from Leeds Business School said that the event was: “A week of honest conversations with industry leaders, late-night laughs with students from every corner of the world, and in a city that somehow made it all feel cinematic. The learning was real. The connections, even more so… I left fuller in every sense of the word.”

Businet is a non-profit educational networking organisation that has 149 educational members across 37 countries. Businet was originally established in 1987 as a network of higher education institutions to promote and develop business education. However, since this time the network has diversified into areas besides business including arts, creative industries, health, law, media, communications, tourism, STEM, sustainability and computing, attracting members from this very diverse range of subject areas.