(Original Swedish post published 10 January, English version posted 11 January.)
Welcome back after the holidays – and Happy New Year! We will soon be welcoming new students, the traditional reception will take place this Friday. As in the autumn, many new students have a hard time finding a place to live, so we appeal to everyone who has a room they can rent out to help the new students get off to as good a start as possible.
Today we (Anders and Eva) visited Uppsala Business & Economics Students Association (Uppsalaekonomerna), one of the new student unions at our University. Now there are six student unions in total: Uppsala Student Union, Rindi (Gotland’s Student Union), the Pharmaceutical Student Association, the Uppsala Business & Economics Students Association, the Law Students’ Association in Uppsala and the Uppsala Union of Engineering and Science Students. Afterwards Eva met the University officials who will be conferring doctoral degrees at the Winter Conferment Ceremony. It’s always a pleasure to look forward to honouring our graduating doctoral students, honorary doctors and prize winners. Everyone is welcome to the ceremony in Uppsala Cathedral on 27 January.
Now we’re summing up 2016 and busy putting the annual report together. I recently received a report on Uppsala University’s cooperation with Drivhuset Uppsala, which I would like to share with you.
Uppsala students have lots of exciting business ideas and the non-profit foundation Drivhuset Uppsala seeks to support and inspire them to dare to try to put their ideas into practice. In the course of 2016, Uppsala University contributed commitment and valuable funding to boost contributions from the business sector and the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth. The funding enabled Drivhuset to organise inspirational and educational activities for 1,340 participants and offer individual business development support at 401 meetings with 276 unique individuals. 105 business ideas came from 72 students, 26 alumni and 7 researchers from Uppsala University.