Networking evening a success

Students and recent graduates gather in the hallway at St. Vladimir Institute
before the networking event got under way

On Thursday November 22, SUSK the Ukrainian Student organization and UCPBA-Toronto co-hosted a very successful networking event at St. Vladimir Institute in downtown Toronto. The event was a way to bring students and recent graduates together with people who have many years of experience in various fields. The students had an opportunity to pick whom they wanted to speak with and then had three 20-minute "speed date" session where they could ask all about their desired field of employment, make connections and learn something from other people's experience.

Michael Zienchuk, Manager of UCU's Wealth Strategies Group
chats with a pair of students

The event was the brain child of Dr. George Foty. Earlier in the year he put together a group of individuals and representatives of various organizations and tasked them with creating an infrastructure to provide networking opportunities for Ukrainian-Canadian youth in Toronto and surrounding areas. The group has worked together over the past few months to make this very successful event happen. Ukrainian Credit Union Limited was proud to be a sponsor of this event along with St. Vladimir Institute which very generously provided the space to hold the event.

The theatre at St. Vladimir Institute was packed with people and abuzz with conversations as students scrambled to ask as many questions as possible during the official round table portion. Each student could select up to 3 individuals to speak with and then had 20 minutes with each person they selected. Afterwards everyone stuck around to mingle and share more stories.

The turnout was fantastic in the words of the organizers. Some 75 people showed up of which more than fifty were students looking to make some important business connections and learn how to network.

The key message delivered both by the key note speaker George Horhota as well as many of the networkers was: "Don't be passive. Meet people. Network, network, network. Join clubs. Be active in your community. Don't be afraid to ask those with experience for advice. Give yourself a leg up on the thousands of other people who want the same job as you by being in touch with many people, who knows, one of them might be able to help you out.

If you missed last night's event, don't worry, there will be more. We are planning to hold two events a year. One in the spring and one in the fall. So keep an eye out on our website and facebook page for further news.

For more pictures please visit our Facebook page.