Leading 600 engineering students

Liga MPT · Polytechnic University of Timișoara · 2017–2019

Liga MPT is the student organisation of the Faculty of Management in Production and Transportation at the Polytechnic University of Timișoara. As its president, I represented more than 600 students to the faculty and the university.

In numbers

• Time: 2 years as president.
• Money: about €12,000 raised from sponsors, on a budget that started at zero.
• Errors: 24 of 25 events ran as planned.
• Adoption: volunteers leaving within a year fell from 40% to 15%, and about 50 students got an internship or a job through our partners.
• Scale: more than 600 students, 40 volunteers in 4 teams, 18 partner companies and events for up to 400 people.

The job

A student organisation is a company with no money, no contracts and volunteers who can leave whenever they like. Everything runs on trust.

• A team of 40 volunteers across events, partnerships, education and PR.
• Events: career fairs, company visits, workshops and freshers’ week, for up to 400 people at a time.
• Partners: local companies that sponsored events and hired our students.
• A voice: I sat in faculty meetings and took the students’ problems to the people who could fix them.

What I learned

Liga MPT was my first real management job. You learn quickly that a plan nobody believes in doesn’t happen, and that the most important meeting is the one where you listen.

It is the lesson I still use with clients: the people who do the work decide whether a new tool succeeds.