Berend (Beer) Leonard Kwak

Beer Kwak is a third-year Bachelor’s student in Business Administration and last year, he also enrolled in a Bachelor’s degree programme in Philosophy of Economics and Social Sciences. He complements these degree programmes with an extracurricular course on Heidegger. In secondary school, he was a professional cyclist and at the start of his studies, he enjoyed a meteoric career as a successful sales manager in his part-time job. Alongside his studies, he also followed a Master Class at the Boston Consultancy Group (BCG), and completed additional consultancy projects at his own Faculty. He has been selected to take part in the Netherlands-Asia Honours Summer School. As part of this Honours programme, students are prepared for six months in the Netherlands for what collaboration with Asia entails, and then spend three weeks studying in Singapore and Malaysia. The consultancy topic submitted by a company that Beer will be specifically focusing on at the Summer School is sustainability, and in this context, he will be analysing all of the company’s business activities. On the basis of these analyses, he will formulate some recommendations for improvement. The objective is that this will lead also to an academic publication.

Beer is also active as a student representative in the UG consultative bodies. For example, he was a member of the Faculty Council for two years on behalf of the ‘Studentorganisatie Groningen’ (SOG), he acted as year representative at QUEST, where he worked towards improving the degree programme in Business Administration, and in his role as President of the Speakers Committee of the Faculty Association EBF, he helped organize events such as TEDxUniversityofGroningen 2022. His pitch shows Beer to be someone with a strong personal drive and great affinity for entrepreneurship.