In this new edition of the Student Academic Conference (SAC), around 80 students participated in 24 teams make up of students from 18 different bachelor’s degree programmes from the Catalan universities UPC, UB, UAB, ESADE, Abad Oliba and UPF, in addition to ours, and UNIR.

On Saturday morning, 4 March, the groups presented their papers before a jury comprised of lecturers from different Catalan universities, who in charge of choosing one winner and four finalist projects. These were announced after the closing presentation.

The winner was the group make up of three UIC Barcelona health students: Alondra Guzmán, Nursing; and Oliver Tohidi and Sofía Vicente, Medicine. The title of the paper was: “The impact of the COVID-19 epidemic on university student mental health and life.”

Pedro Diaz Ridao spoke about how to work on good leadership, with the presentation “Caring leadership.” He summarised it in three key elements: self-knowledge, intelligence-driven motivation and caring for the environment: “To decide is to choose” he said, “and to choose is to relinquish.” Therefore, he explained, “the important thing is to ask for forgiveness when you need to, to ask for help and to keep moving forward. That the greatest enemy of a caring leadership is loneliness.”