The IIE Europe Award for Excellence is a new award initiative launched by the IIE Europe team to recognize outstanding achievement in international education. The criteria for recipients include meaningful contributions to IIE's mission of Opening Minds to the World®, relevance to European higher education, and high impact on the European education community.

  

This year, the award went to Eszter Szabó of General Electric. Eszter has been the driving force behind several innovative initiatives. This is all the more admirable because in fact this is something she does in addition to her main job: she leads GE's strategic communications and public affairs in 16 countries from Lithuania down to Greece. She is responsible for government and stakeholder engagement, and the company's growth strategies.

 

Eszter's ability to "think outside the box" has already brought many innovative projects to life. First and foremost, the GE Foundation Scholar-Leaders Program, of which she is the greatest patron and "honorary mother". This program provides financial support as well as workshops, trainings and shadowing day opportunities to second year undergraduate students from selected universities in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania. As part of the program, students are required to perform community service, thus giving back to their communities. A key goal of the program is to create a Central-Eastern European regional network of future leaders who can tackle and solve problems in the area using a regional approach.

 

 

First of all we would like to thank all of you who were able to attend our annual holiday party in Budapest. We truly enjoyed welcoming you for an evening of networking.

 

Photos from the evening are now available on our flickr page.

 

For those of you who were unable to attend, we would also like to share the IIE Europe Year in Review 2011 presentation that was featured at the reception. 

 

The video below gives a small snapshot of all of the people and programs that took place this year.