GISA Spring Election 2025 Candidate Profiles: Laurens Houwink for PDC President

In conversation with Laurens Houwink, MINT Sustainable Trade & Finance 1st Year.

Q. What makes you the ideal candidate for your role, and how do you believe your background will help you succeed in this position?

With my Master in Organisational Psychology, I worked with Oxfam, Training for Good, a Business School for Refugees and a sustainable bank. I designed career trainings for young policy-makers on AI governance, analysed the capacities of climate activists, and analysed the implementation career trainings. With this knowledge and experience, I believe that I am well-positioned to guide the Professional Development Committee. My passion in life is to empower those who want to make a positive societal and environmental impact in their careers. I became aware of this purpose while supporting the work of NGOs in making positive impact. During this work, I realised that my added value is to strengthen the efforts and skills of people that work on sustainable development.

Q. How do you plan to approach the role  in a way that ensures the smooth running of GISA’s operations and fosters a collaborative atmosphere?

From my bachelor thesis on Effective Leadership in Virtual Teams, I learned that people often have a misperception of leaders: they perceive leaders to have a vision based on which they ‘direct’ a team. A vision is important, but it’s equally important to have a situational awareness with which one can analyse situations that a team encounters, how the team deals with them and whether to steer that process. Having such situational awareness will be my contribution to a collaborative atmosphere at GISA, in addition to my positive energy (the smile I bring every morning), my attentive listening skills and empathetic engagement in general.

Q. What past experiences have prepared you for the challenges of this role, and how will you use these experiences to improve GISA’s  efficiency?

Besides gaining 2-3 years of work experience, I wrote a dissertation on flow at work which got nominated for the best Dutch Master Thesis in Organisational Psychology and is currently under review for a journal publication. I learnt from this experience that GISA’s efficiency is greatly improved if everyone works from a state of mind in which their skills match the challenges which they perceive at work. Such challenge-skill fit is an essential ingredient of flow and therefore crucial to get the team into a growth mindset.

Q. If elected, what would be your primary goal and how would you ensure its successful implementation during your tenure?

My primary goal is to make the workshops and activities of the Professional Development Committee more powerful, which means that they are even better adapted to the needs and interests of students. A great deal of this work is to analyse the demands of students: what aspects of their professional development do they to receive further guidance on? I want to investigate this further to ensure that we organise trainings that closely align with what students feel passionate about.

Q. How do you plan to make GISA more accessible and transparent for students, particularly when it comes to administrative processes and decision-making?

Accessibility and transparency are very important topics to ensure that GISA’s operations remain relevant and inclusive to all students. The challenge in this regard is to find balance between being consistent and fair, and being flexible and quick. It’s similar to the UN: rules and procedures bring consistency and fairness, but make an organisation slower to respond. To bridge this dilemma, we should ensure that there is pro-active communication and guidance for students on how to get the most out of what GISA can offer to them.

Q.What are three core values you bring to your role?

1. Empathy, 2. Inclusiveness and 3. Visionary

Q.Lastly, a few creative ways or plans of action (chance to do something different)

I’m very passionate in developing a career that contributes to nature and society. As a ski and snowboard instructor, I’ve realised that it’s great to discover sources of passion and flow which are beyond our regular professional domains. Finding flow in your personal life can guide you to find flow in your professional life. This makes it interesting to explore our inner life through drawing and journaling. Although these activities are often not directly linked to professional development, they are very powerful in developing your personal vision in life and can steer you in choosing career paths and identifying which career skills to develop.