HELEN OLENA KUZMYCH

The first iteration of the Buddy program started as a “proof of concept” initiative, an attempt to explore the limits and the contribution of luck versus personal effort in building a community.

In my first year as a student at KU Leuven we didn’t have a Buddy program on our campus, only a few specialized student clubs, but overall the student community felt very fragmented. There was a lot of disconnect between generations of BBA cohorts - second year students had virtually no contact with newcomers unless they had to repeat a class. At that moment it didn’t feel like we would be graduating as part of a network.

When the program was founded, alongside with all the immediate and practical benefits that we aimed to create for both mentors and mentees, the hope was that one day far in the future, we will have a sense of familial community when meeting someone else who studied business on our campus. Even if you’ve never met before. The dream was to end up with a wide and supportive network of our alma mater, and for that I felt like I needed to start with creating an interconnected community here and now.

And of course, it made me very happy that I could help people meet, connect and make friends without the threat of rejection. Reaching out to a complete stranger with a question or with a simple hope to become friends can be very scary. So this program was a way to guarantee you a friend when you need them the most. The self-selection of the mentors at the registration stage helped us ensure that: people who don’t want to connect and aren’t willing to help simply would not sign up.

In the first year of the program it didn’t look like much. There was a google-form for people to sign up. Later, with the help of my good friend Ines Jin Elvira, we manually matched students with each other according to the information in their applications and then sent out personalised emails to all of them. That year we ended up having around 20 volunteers and 70 students to mentor. All the volunteers were recruited personally and mostly were friends or friends of friends.

The program immediately got traction, and I am so grateful that KU Leuven recognised the added value and the potential scale of it even before I did. Our faculty had the foresight to invest in the development of a software tool that would do the matching automatically which proved to be an amazing idea. Then in the second edition of the program (still in a form of an excel sheet) me and my friend Carolina Chaluleu had to match and connect 70 mentors with approximately 120 newcomers, all while organising a welcome day event. The workload became much more demanding. In that moment, we were very excited to have a little tech-helper being built for us. That year we had our first get-together event which was supported and sponsored by our faculty (FEB) together with Stuvo+ and ended up being a great success.