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Dear Fellow Students,

Many of you may be familiar with the NEXT career fair. Those of you who have been at university for a longer period of time may even remember its predecessor, the FiT.

Organizing career fairs at the SIC has been an integral part to our students’ council work for over 25 years. For many years, we have solely organised the “Firmeninformationstage” (FiT, “Company Information Days”). For a few years, the main organisation of the job fair has been taken over by the Career Center (Triathlon) of the university. The Students’ Council was still a major part of these job fairs, especially in the set-up, planning assistance and the support of exhibitors.

The cooperation with Triathlon was specified in a separate cooperative contract. This contract was cancelled by Triathlon at the end of last year, due to a shift in responsibilities required from the Students’ Council and the responsibilities laid down in the contract. However, both Triathlon and the Students’ Council were both interested in specifying a new contract to continue this cooperation.

After long and difficult negotiations with Triathlon, we want to inform you that we could not come down to terms that would have been agreeable for both sides. For this reason, the Students’ Council has decided in a recent internal meeting to discontinue the cooperation with Triathlon regarding the NEXT career fair.

The reasons for this decision are manyfold. While the organisation of the FiT, and later the first years of the NEXT, was carried out with a lot of passion and conviction by the involved members, this has increasingly faded in the last years. NEXT increasingly changed from a persuasion project to an “obligation”, sometimes even a burden. One reason for this is, that the NEXT itself has evolved. From a career fair aimed at Computer Scientists, to a career fair aimed at ALL students. A development that we generally encourage and want to support. However, it also comes with new responsibilities and additional workload for us. In our negotiations with Triathlon we could not find a consensus how these shall be considered in the future.

Therefore, we have decided not to involve ourself with the NEXT career fair for the time being. We would rather use the freed up resources and time to commit ourself even more to our existing events and maybe even establish some new ones.

This of course does not mean, that the NEXT will disappear. The Triathlon Transfer GmbH will continue to organize and carry out the NEXT. It is simply us as the Students’ Council that will not be involved any more. Therefore we will also not actively advertise the NEXT career fair on our established communication channels.

Even though we now go separate ways in terms of the NEXT career fair, we would like to thank Triathlon for the cooperation in the last few years. The discussions and plannings for the next were often very productive and we appreciated the constructive discourse with the employees of Triathlon. We wish them most of success for the upcoming NEXT.

If you, the students of the SIC still have questions regarding this decision, feel free to contact us via our established communication channels.