ESN Tallinn

Have you ever been to the Estonian capital city Tallinn? There, winters are long and cold, but... girls are hot and blonde. What’s more? ESN Tallinn became the Section in the Spotlight for the month of June 2012! Something not to miss, right?

History of ESN Tallinn dates back to 2003 when the section was established at former Tallinn Pedagogical University (now Tallinn University). Since then, more and more Erasmus students kept coming to study in Tallinn and today ESN Tallinn section co-operates very successfully with 10 universities in Tallinn. Nevertheless, the section structure consists of 5 board members and around 30 active members. Given the conditions, the communication between all the team members is on excellent level, with regular meetings every 2 weeks to discuss and give feedback on past events, and to plan future activities. New coordinators are recruited there, too. Section is very active in usage of Google tools and pretty much for every event that is being organised they create an online description with all the steps and things to do and advice for the future.

Needless to say, ESN Tallinn always encouraged their Erasmus students not only in active participation, but also in active organisation of ESN events and attending meetings. Erasmus students are often parts of teams organising various ESN activities which does not only provide great promotion among other Erasmus but creates immediate feedback for the section’s board to take into account for future activities, to make them even better.

Scope of activities done by ESN Tallinn is very wide, beginning with regular Orientation Weeks at the beginning of each semester, trips not only around Estonia but also to Russia or Lapland, visits of museums, National Opera or ballet performances, Erasmus Quiz and all kind of sport events. And awesome parties, of course! =) The section takes active part in Tallinn Student Days, too.

Perhaps the most important activity of all is called ESN Diary. Every semester a booklet of 250 pages full of articles, pictures and memories of Erasmus, ESN-ers & tutors is created, that is given away at the Farewell Party. It makes a perfect piece of memory for every Erasmus student of their stay in Tallinn.

As in this year the flagship project of ESN was SocialErasmus, ESN Tallinn could not miss this opportunity and got involved very actively in whole project to offer Erasmus in Tallinn a whole new perspective of spending time. The biggest project was called Big Family Day. The purpose of this project occurring twice a month in March and April was to get together Erasmus students with less fortunate children from Estonia. Erasmus students played plenty of games, told them interesting facts and stories about their home countries and generally had loads of fun together. The whole project resulted into Big Family Day celebration on the 6th of May, which was mostly put together by 2 Erasmus students, with plenty more helping out. The children learned for example Bollywood dance and everything ended up with a magic show! Every kid got their own SocialErasmus T-shirt so they could have a piece of memory of this special time, too.

As mentioned above, organisation of ESN Tallinn is rather special, therefore requires high amount of motivation to get everything and everyone going in right direction. This is done through several teambuilding activities, workshops and events for buddies organised by the section to keep the ESN Spirit burning. ESN Tallinn is also involved in National and International level of ESN through Katre Trei, current National representative of ESN Estonia, who comes from this section.

But most important thing according to ESN Tallinn is its members - no matter which university they come from, they always think of ESN & Erasmus in terms of Tallinn, not their universities. This selfless attitude is what makes ESN Tallinn so strong and creates endless energy for new and better activities to offer to Erasmus students. An example worth following!

Article written by Prokop Teper