Exchange to Change June 2015 | Page 14

Opportunities & events Congratulations Alumni Applause Alumni | student events Theses Mr. Adamon Mukasa (IOB alumnus, MSc. Governance and Development, 2010-11), has successfully defended his PhD dissertatin entitled ‘Empirical essays on the economics of food price shocks: Evidence from Uganda’ and obtained a PhD in Economics and Management, University of Trento, Italy. Mr. Ha Minh Tri (IOB researcher), has successfully defended his PhD dissertation entitled ‘An analysis of influence of evaluation in the context of socio-economic development plan (SEDP) implementation in Vietnam - The case of Hai lang district, Quang Tri province” and obtained a PhD in Development Studies from IOB, University of Antwerp, Belgium. Meet and greet Burundi: On 8 February 2015, a meet and greet session was hosted by Prof. Vandeginste at the hotel La Palmeraie in Bujumbura allowing old friends to meet again and reminisce! Other Meherun Shikha (IOB alumna, Governance and Development, 201314) currently working as a research associate at the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD) in Bangladesh, provides food for thought with her article ‘A Step Toward Solving the South Asian Water Crisis’ in the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs http://journal.georgetown.edu/ Stefanie Deschepper (IOB alumna, Globalization and Development, 2012-13) currently working at the Belgian Technical Cooperation in Palestine wrote a blog on ‘Gender in the Palestinian Territories’ Adityo P Ramadhan (IOB alumnus, Governance and Development, 2011-12) has published an article on Health workers absenteeism: Indonesia urban public health centres in the Journal of Public Health About seven weeks later, on Friday 27 March 2015, another meet and greet session was hosted by Dr. Bert Ingelaere in Hotel Umubano, in Kigali for the Rwandese alumni. Here too, it was a happy reunion! Thank you! During the spring of 2015, IOB was evaluated by an external visitation commission twice, once for the accreditation of its master programmes and once for the Evaluation of the Management Agreement with the Flemish Community, which funds IOB. In both cases, the commission of external evaluators wanted to talk to all relevant stakeholders, including current students and alumni. Therefore several students and alumni kindly agreed to feature in the students and alumni panel for both evaluations. Thank you for your participation! We had a nice evening at Kassa 4 … and two positive evaluations out of it! IDPM versus IDPM On 29 April some 60 students from the Institute of Development Policy and Management (IDPM) from the University of Manchester came to visit IOB. Three parallel sessions on development/management oriented topics were organized and students could choose which one to attend. The apotheosis, however, was the soccer game IDPM versus IOB. The victory was ours (so overwhelmingly we even lost track of the score!) But most importantly it was a lot of fun! 14 Evaluating IOB Another big thank you goes out to the almost 300 IOB alumni who participated in our online survey. The full report is available online. In a nutshell, with regard to alumni opinions of their IOB education, the survey shows very positive results. An overwhelming majority of the alumni (92 percent) are satisfi Y