In early January, students of the European consortium eMERGE held their first official Student Forum, with 10 officials participating from 6 universities:
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Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences (INN) - Coordinator of the Student Forum
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Université Rennes 2 - Coordinator of the eMERGE partnership
Members of the ESF are students who hold key roles at their universities in their student unions and associations. Together, their goal will be to generate ideas and create tangible benefits for the combined student populations. They will also be looking to create connections amongst the different student communities and will seek to integrate student organizations as partners in this dynamic as they work towards building durable relations.
The students intend to focus on two areas: academic policy (i.e. academic transparency in common mobility programs including, the availability of courses, grading systems and more); and cultural exchange (i.e. activities that will help to bring students together around social and cultural activities). They have already discussed potentially creating a common blog, a video challenge to present their campuses, organizing concerts, creative festivals and sport exchanges.
In the short-term, each member of the consortium will be nominating two people from their university to participate in the academic and cultural exchange sub-committees. Once in place, these representatives will present ideas for the 2021 Action Plan to the ESF plenary group and the overall consortium steering committee.
Students from Rennes 2 who are interested in learning more or getting involved can contact the Rennes 2 Student Vice-Presidents, Johanna Courtel and Ugo Thomas: johanna.courtel [at] univ-rennes2.fr (johanna[dot]courtel[at]univ-rennes2[dot]fr) and ugo-thomas [at] outlook.fr (ugo-thomas[at]outlook[dot]fr).
More information on eMERGE
eMERGE is a Rennes 2-led European consortium which seeks to connect and transform our individual educational and research-based programs for the benefit of our students, researchers and local communities.
Combined, our seven institutions have over 105,000 students. While we each have varying cultures, languages and educational programs, our aim is to build a new long-term joint strategy with a bottom-up approach which will impact and support all of our areas of activities, from teaching and learning to research and innovation, whilst encouraging new forms of student and staff mobility. In short, we aim to create systemic changes in how we cooperate and operate to the benefit of our communities and local stakeholders.
On March 11 and 12, 2021 , the International Relations Office of Rennes 2 will also be holding its first eMERGE Staff Week, in the form of online collaborative workshops. The aim is to strengthen links between partners, to develop remote collaboration, to work on common themes and to continue the dynamics of European project submission and in particular that of the European Universities Initiative in 2022 or in 2023.
