This past week, four brave CFES representatives (Atilla Hertel, Balaz Hertel, Erin Matheson and Samantha Pinto) traveled to Dortmund, Germany for bonding Camp 2010. Camp, also known as bonding’s Annual General Meeting offered some insight into the current operations of German engineering students, as well as a glimpse of the sights, sounds, and carbonated taste of the German culture.
Firstly, who are these bonding people and what do they want from us? Similar to CFES, bonding is a national engineering and technology student organization in Germany that was first established in 1988. The focus of bonding is to offer development and improvement opportunities for its members and provide connections to industry. Unlike CFES, one must actively become a member of bonding, and can do so by joining one of the 11 local groups that make up the organization. Each group acts similarly to our very own EngSoc by providing its members with most of the services that bonding is known for. What bonding does better than any other organization of its kind is job fairs, as each local group puts on one per year. Each group brings in between 60 and 260 companies over the course of 3 days, allowing for both bonding members as well as their surrounding community to search for internships and full-time jobs related to their field of study. Groups also put on local company visits, soft skill training sessions by both the group as well as company representatives, and formal dinners with companies. Since 2000, bonding as a whole has also developed its own internal training system, which offers workshops on soft skills such as project management and discussion facilitation, and bonding European Workshops (bEW’s) which are complimentary education courses that are very similar to CFES CE courses.
The first part of Camp this year was the International Summit between CFES and bonding. This meeting was meant to serve both as a forum for sharing ideas, and as an opportunity to renew the cooperation agreement between these two groups which expired at CFES Congress earlier this year. bonding and CFES have been working together in varying capacities since their first contact with each other at the Board of European Students of Technology (BEST) General Assembly in Stockholm back in 2000, and this agreement was originally written as a formal, documented representation of this relationship. The spirit of the agreement is “to learn and develop from each other by sharing information and expertise on both national and local levels for the benefit of our members,” and the agreement goes on to define this in more formal terms. It states that two CFES delegates shall attend Camp every year as well as a bonding Presidents Meeting, and that two bonding delegates shall attend Congress as well as the Canadian Engineering Competition. It goes on to define collaboration in areas such as job fairs, career support, complimentary education courses, competitions, member training, as well as the sharing of information stored in each respective organization’s online database. Additional clauses were added to this revision to address some frustrations which were raised during the meeting, including language barrier issues, communication to the other organizations general members, as well as addressing how to approach new collaborative projects between the two groups. Following the cancellation of the International Engineering Competition (IEC) in December of last year, a clarification was made that such projects would require their own written agreement, so that should the project fail, the status of the original agreement would not be jeopardized. The revision of the agreement was completed, and will be approved by both organizations by the end of the year.
The remainder of the week was bonding’s annual ‘Camp’, which was almost like Congress, but in the wilderness, and with truckloads of beer. Literally. Workshops and the elections of their new Presidents and Ambassadors were accompanied with theme parties, bonding’s famous ‘Rally’, as well as a regional evening where each group brought food and drinks native to their part of Germany, all of which made for an unforgettable week. Although this was the first year where more than two delegates were sent to camp, this is the start of a trend that is most likely to continue in the future, not only for Camp, but for other bonding events as well. I’d highly recommend for anyone to attend any of bonding’s events or conferences if given the chance, as it’s a guaranteed unforgettable way to truly see what ‘German Engineering’ is all about.
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