A two-week exchange of experience with foreign students, filled with interesting lectures, exciting practical tasks, and presentations of youth initiatives – this is how the new academic year began for two students of Lviv University – Viktoriia Kozyar, a second-year student of the Faculty of Philology, and Anastasiia Pavlenko, a third-year student of the Faculty of Geology. At Mykolas Romeris University (Vilnius, Lithuania), the INTERADIS project held introductory lectures for young people and demonstrated how foreign students integrate into the universities they chose for exchange. The project coordinators in Lithuania tried to illustrate the adaptation process through vivid presentations, travel, and game-based methods of learning information.
It was also a good opportunity for students to exchange knowledge and ideas with their peers who came to Vilnius from Ukraine as part of the INTERADIS project. In particular, with representatives of Mariupol State University, Sumy National Agrarian University, Yuriy Fedkovych Chernivtsi National University, National University of Water and Environmental Engineering, Odesa Polytechnic National University, and V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University.
According to the girls, this experience was unforgettable and showed the full range of what awaits Ukrainian universities after our victory. They have seen firsthand that Mykolas Romeris University welcomes all students and allows them to develop, guiding them to achieve their goals. “We felt special support for Ukrainian students. The university warmly welcomed us, helped us at every stage, and explained everything we did not understand. Ukrainian students who decide to choose this university as part of their Erasmus+ mobility will be lucky, because it will be incredible weeks of studying in a calm atmosphere, with creative and competent teachers, interesting people, and constant support from the administration. And for us, it has become a good example of how to build cooperation and an environment for communication with foreign students so that they feel comfortable and become promoters of our university,” says Victoria Koziar, a student of the Faculty of Philology.
Along with the student exchange, a meeting of the Project Steering Committee was also held at the University of Foggia, Italy. The project coordinator from our University, Vice-Rector for Scientific and Pedagogical Work and Informatization Vitalii Kukharskyi, took part in this meeting. The consortium members presented the results of their work, discussed project implementation, and planned the next steps and necessary meetings within the program. At the same time, managers from the partner universities reported on the equipment purchased and its use in the implementation of the project goals. Our university received a modern conference system, a multimedia board, a projector, personal computers, and laptops.
Olha Oseredchuk, Head of the Marketing and Development Center, and Vasyl Petryshyn, Head of the Networking and IT Support Center, joined the training for the implementing teams and learned about the best practices of marketing and the use of information technology in attracting and adapting foreign students.
The meeting also discussed the idea of introducing a new national online system for enrolling foreign students in universities, which involves joint work of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Migration Service, the Ministry of Education and Science and universities. The issue of an online platform/information system for managing the international activities of universities in the context of options popular in European universities was also discussed: Mobility online https://www.service4mobility.com/europe/LoginServlet?sprache=en, MoveOn.
The event was also attended by the Ukrainian State Center for International Education of the Ministry of Education and Science, with whose leadership Lviv University representatives discussed plans for further cooperation.
The prospect of attracting European partner universities to the next international schools of Data Engineering and Security and Artificial Intelligence Technology held at Lviv University was also discussed.
In the end, all the participants of the conference shared their plans for the project and fresh ideas for the implementation of new joint important initiatives!