Who says fun and learning can’t go right hand in hand? While having a great time, everyone can acquire knowledge and develop skills by playing creative games with open-minded people. Now, let’s add other ingredients and make the perfect recipe for a lovely weekend: fifty souls, teambuilding, and a cottage near Beliș. We call it Erasmus+ Ambassadors Autumn Training Event and it was #AWESOME. Funded by ESAA – Erasmus Students and Alumni Alliance, the event took place between the 15th and 17th of November and, despite the short period of time, it was intense, demanding, and full of useful and practical information at once.
We can think of the event in terms of a magical number: 3. During these three days, three training sessions were held by three different trainers. All of them had the same main purpose – to teach the ESNers the most important pieces of information about Erasmus and to show them the proper way to turn theory into practice, while being constantly divided into never-the-same groups and teams.
Cristian Pașka, the president of ESN Cluj-Napoca, was responsible for presenting the participants the Erasmus+ opportunities and also for preparing them for the Mobility Days, which is why the training eventually turned into an enthusiastic role-playing game, where all of us were, at a time, the informants and the informed.
The other trainings were not just complementary as a subject, but were also held by two co-founders of garagErasmus, the first Erasmus Generation professional network. Dora David made sure to take the participants out of their comfort zone by putting them into the situation of having a speech (or many) in front of the others, but, thankfully, not before giving them some lifesaving tips and tricks regarding this challenge. The perfect completion came from Miruna Iliescu and her communication training, where the ESNers were divided for the last time into categories: the friendly, the analytical, the quiet, and the direct ones.
Of course, the whole experience wouldn’t have been the same without all the fun happenings lasting from the evening until late at night, the board games, dancing, and storytelling moments and it definitely wouldn’t have been as special and bonding without the presence of the ESN members from Alba Iulia, Târgu Mureș, Brașov and Chișinău, all from one and only wonderful big family.
The Mobility Days
The fruits of the training sessions appeared shortly afterwards, in December, during the Mobility Days. The event was a complex one and covered not less than 4 cities (Cluj-Napoca, Târgu Mureș, Brașov, and Alba Iulia), 5 partner universities, and 11 information sessions.
Those were the times when the volunteers put into practice everything they had learnt during the Erasmus+ Ambassadors Autumn Training Event. Inside the faculties, working as a team once again, the ESNers approached the students and showed them all the chances they could take by simply joining the Erasmus+ programme. Some students were really curious and interested in the topic, while some of them were quite passive. But the most important of it all is that, in the end, there are 578 successfully informed students about every single one of the Erasmus+ opportunities. And not few are the future Erasmus+ students, in a never ending circle of the Erasmus generation.
Written by: Cristina-Elena Talpoș