More than three months passed since the
greatest SU of this year started. However, preparations and first negotiations
with co-organizers (AEGEE-Kyiv) and reports for SUCT (Summer University
Coordination Team) started much earlier – in December 2011.
You can find a
lot of reports and exciting stories about multiple events in AEGEE magazine
created by participants to express their feelings and share emotions and
AEGEE-experience. We want to tell you about the organizational part of every
single event.
Preparation.
You have to be lucky, persistent and talented to
organize a good event. Especially in Ukraine. Especially with lack of budget.
But with excess of enthusiasm. As we are.
Website, facebook group, promo-video and many other
things were created to promote our event and make them unforgettable.
Huge number of
emails was sent to companies that could support us and every answer we received
made us feel like Olympic winners.
In the end we have full welcome-packs for
participants, printed T-shorts with -50% discounts, accommodation in hostels for three times lower prices specially for our
organization and a lot of AEGEE-friendly companies!
Participants.
We knew it in
advance that our participants would be brave (as they chose Ukraine as a summer
university destination), creative (our event called “shoot the moment” was
devoted to photo and video production) and smart (90% of applicants were guys – so
they must have heard something about beauty of Ukrainian girls, and 10% of
female participants realized that there would be a lot of nice guys here).
We received
about 100 applications and chose 26 from them to participate in our event. We
invited 26 people from 13 different countries to visit Ukraine from August 13th
till 27th. Unfortunately, one of them forgot that international passport is required
for this trip and total number of participants became 25. :)
Program.
We made some
research about things that are interesting for foreigners in Ukraine. But as
football fans who were not interested in architect sights during EURO-2012, our
active members of AEGEE-Europe and future participants of our SU aren’t typical
tourists. So we tried to make our program active and not-full-of-sightseeing.
We organized
quest city-game, cooking workshop (typical Ukrainian dish “vareniki”), kayaking
on Seversky Donets river, lazer tag competition, excursion by tram,
lessons about photoshop and creativity, photo studio master class,
boogie-woogie dance training and many other activities in Kharkiv. Also, our
participants were impressed by all Ukrainian traditions, museums and
“marshrutkas” they saw in the big and awesome capital, Kyiv.
Perfect Team!
Nothing can be
achieved without a coordinated team, and in our international project it was
also a key to success. Every day and night during the last three weeks before
the event there were meetings of Kharkiv organizers, online skype conferences between Kharkiv and Kyiv board teams. Responsible and attentive members with god's help made our event successful!
Today
SUCT released results of summer universities evaluation (every participant can
evaluate the SU he/she attended). We took the 35th place out of 81.
It was our first international project. We are the winners anyway!
We would like
to thank AEGEE-Kyiv, helpers and members of AEGEE-Kharkiv, our partners and
sponsors, and especially participants for making this summer incredible,
memories bright and, of course, moments shooted!
*AEGEE-Kharkiv – is youth non-profit organisation, which is part of
International Student Organisation AEGEE-Europe. As a non-governmental,
politically independent and non-profit organisation AEGEE is open to students
and young professionals from all faculties and disciplines who are from 18 to
35 years old.
AEGEE provides the ideal platform where youth workers and young volunteers from 43 European countries can work together on crossborder activities such as conferences, seminars, exchanges, training courses, Case Study trips, Working Group meetings and Cultural Exchange.
AEGEE provides the ideal platform where youth workers and young volunteers from 43 European countries can work together on crossborder activities such as conferences, seminars, exchanges, training courses, Case Study trips, Working Group meetings and Cultural Exchange.
