ESN at the 24th Annual EAIE Conference in Dublin

Erasmus Student Network was represented at the biggest conference about international higher education. The EAIE (European Association for International Education) is all about internationalisation, mobility and higher education - a place where ESN should not be missing. To give you an idea about its dimension, more than 4200 higher education professionals from over 80 countries gathered in Dublin in September 2012.

We had three presentations and two poster sessions.

Our sessions were:

• Can mobility be a key answer to youth unemployment? presented by Emanuel Alfranseder, President of ESN
• Is mobility within Higher Education accessible to all students? presented by Katharina Ma, Vice-President of ESN
• Staff development for the internationalization of the curriculum presented by Katharina Ma, Vice-President of ESN

Our two poster sessions were about:

• SocialErasmus presented by Juan Colino, Communication manager of ESN
• ESNSurvey 2012 presented by Emanuel Alfranseder, President of ESN

The sessions were a great opportunity to foster existing contacts, make new ones, and show off the great projects ESN is capable of doing. Katharina as a presenter and Emanuel as a chair opened the event of the special interest group that puts their efforts into improving the accessibility of mobility. Needless to say that this was the perfect opportunity to showcase our ExchangeAbility project. Emanuel’s session included the head of the Erasmus unit of the European Commission, Vanessa Debiais-Sainton. In this session ESN presented the new results of the ESNSurvey that very much affirm the question posed and show that mobility is part of the answer to youth unemployment.

In addition many additional contacts were made and many institutional stakeholders were able to get to know more about ESN and the current International Board. For example, Katharina made valuable contact with the university in Luxembourg (as you might now, Luxembourg is the only EU member country without an ESN section). We hope this will bear fruit in the future and we can welcome their university to our network in the future. All in all, the conference was an experience for all of us and we represented ESN well and made some useful contacts for the future.

Additional information:

• Website of the 24th Annual EAIE Conference, Dublin, September 11-14, 2012
• EAIE website