Summer greeting from the dean

Photo: AU Foto

Dear staff

Summer is here, and soon we can look forward to a well-deserved holiday outside of the school walls. Before that, I would like to thank you all for a good spring semester, and tell you a bit about what we in the faculty management team have been working with during the spring. In April, we started the process of evaluating the school’s overall degree programme portfolio. This is an extensive and exciting task, where - for the first time in the history of Aarhus BSS - we look beyond the individual programmes and explore the quality of our overall degree programme selection. We have now identified a number of topics which we look forward to discussing and developing in close cooperation with the academic departments in the time to come.

The purpose of the exercise is primarily to ensure that each degree programme profile is as sharply defined as possible. However, the exercise has also given rise to a good discussion of how we should work with interdisciplinarity here at Aarhus BSS. Naturally, we would very much like to make the most of our broad academic scope by establishing interdisciplinary degree programmes. However, interdisciplinarity is much more than simply combining two academic fields. The value of interdisciplinarity becomes most evident when the academic combination inspires us to look at things in a new way and contributes to elevating and developing the fields in question. This is important to remember.

In the spring, Aarhus BSS also conducted an extensive image and awareness study among select target groups - here, approximately two years after we got our new name. The study showed that almost a third are already familiar with Aarhus BSS. This shows that we have come a long way in just two years. However, many people are still not aware of our new name, and naturally, we must do something about this. In short, we must continue to tell the world around us that Aarhus BSS offers valuable knowledge for the benefit of companies and society.

We can tell people who we are and what we offer in many ways: when our talented graduates find jobs and display their skills; when we cooperate with the world around us; and when we invite our alumni and partners inside the school. That’s why we opened the doors to the very first Aarhus BSS Business Conference in June - a conference which indeed focused on the interdisciplinary nature of our school and on how our knowledge adds value for companies.  And that’s why we each year invite our staff and alumni to a joint summer festival, where participants can socialise and have fun across academic boundaries and industries.

Before I finish, I would like to wish you all a great summer holiday. I look forward to seeing you all next semester and hope to see a lot of you at the summer festival on 18 August!

Best wishes

Thomas Pallesen