October and November are always busy months in the Alumni Volunteering team world, with our team welcoming volunteers back to campus for a host of activities with current students.

A few highlights include the launch of our third year of the Black Industry Connections and Empowerment Programme (BICEP), a unique insight into data science careers with two leading alumni and two informal networking events in the USA led by International Alumni Ambassadors.

USA alumni networking

We welcomed alumni to informal gatherings in New York and Washington DC, hosted by Sophie Bennett (Environmental Science, 2014), Rob Pinn (German with Dutch, 2016) and Roza Vasileva (PhD Digital Economy, 2022).

Rob said: "Roza and I had a great time hosting the happy hour event in DC last night. Everyone had a really good time and shared contact information to meet up sooner than the next official Nottingham event. We had three people who moved to DC in the last six months and events like this really provide a welcome and community in a new city and country." 

BICEP - Season 3

Our Black Industry Connections and Empowerment Programme (BICEP) continues to go from strength to strength, as we welcomed participants for our third year.

Our launch event introduced our student mentees with their alumni mentors, with 13 mentors and 45 students joining us in the Trent Building. In total this year we have 100 students taking part in the programme and 26 mentors.

Faculty of Social Sciences

We also welcomed Dr. Vanja Ljevar (PhD, Computer Science, Psychology, 2021), Co-Founder and Chief Data Scientist at KUBIK Intelligence and Onyinyechi Eke (Economics, 2016), Data & AI Analyst at Accenture, back to campus for a careers talk highlighting the many varied opportunities involved in a role using data science.

This was just one of a number of activities offered to Faculty of Social Sciences students over the month, including a 'Lunch with a Leader' talk with law graduate James Sargent and a session run by the university's Bar Society, welcoming several alumni back to share their experiences of the Bar Course.