Development Office Newsletter: Issue N°4 2010
Column
Summer in Bruges – an intensive experience
In the first three weeks of July, the Development Office organised its renowned summer training programme, the ‘Intensive Seminar on the EU’. We asked three participants from Denmark, the Netherlands and Serbia about their experiences – and heard some interesting responses.
It’s summer time in Bruges – the academic year is over and the Venice of the North is packed with tourists cruising on the canals or sitting on one of the numerous terraces. But also all around the College of Europe campus, you can hear the buzz of people chatting animatedly in various languages. These are not students, however, but the participants from the 17th Intensive Seminar on the EU enjoying a farewell drink in the evening sun.
This year, some 80 participants from 26 countries joined one of the Intensive Seminar Programmes, lasting between one and three weeks. Hectic days of learning, networking and fun lie behind them: from the early sessions on the EU and the Lisbon Treaty, to hands-on workshops on the EU in practice and working visits to the institutions in Brussels. Has it been a worthwhile experience?
“I’m doing my Masters on the EU, so I had some knowledge before I came here, but I learned a lot of new things… When you read books in your mother tongue, they are usually written by somebody from your own country, but during the Seminar you can directly listen to the lecturers and the people who wrote about their own experiences”, says Ksenija from Serbia. Like a number of other participants she came to Bruges through an EU funded project which, among other things, aims at stimulating better understanding of the European Union. As the manager of a network of female entrepreneurs in Serbia, Ksenija will “disseminate the European idea” and even dedicate a column in a Serbian daily to the Intensive Seminar.
Iris who works for the Dutch tobacco industry, will also apply the lessons from the seminar in her professional life: “I work as a lobbyist, and the entire decision-making process, from start to finish concerns the tobacco industry. The Seminar provided me with a lot of strategic knowledge of how to act, where to act, when to act, who I should talk to, how to find the people that I should talk to, or who my colleagues in Brussels should talk to”.
It seems that the mixture of the various training elements is what makes the Seminar so interesting. This year, the programme included three panel debates on the Lisbon Treaty, the EU’s climate policy and the new EU diplomacy.
These debates gave room for balanced analysis: “I’m not against Europe, but I am critical of it, so asking questions was also a way to point out weaknesses within the European Union, not just for myself, but also for people that are actually new to the whole issue,” says Iris. And there were great opportunities for the participants to get first-hand information: “Right now, we are all waiting for the new diplomacy to happen, and it’s critical to know what it is actually going to mean for my minister when he travels, and how he can use it”, says Natalia from Denmark who participated in the two-week ‘Advanced’ Programme. She works at the Danish Ministry for Economy and underlines that she learned many things that will help her in her work on the coordination of the Danish EU Presidency in the coming months.
All the participants we interviewed agreed that they also learned a lot outside the lecture theatre, through the daily contact and exchange with participants from other countries: As Natalia puts it: “you learn about other cultures, you learn about how you would deal with them, which is very useful, because you will actually deal with a lot of these countries afterwards”.
She then compares the programme to the famous Erasmus programme allowing students to study in other EU countries, but Iris corrects her: “The Intensive Seminar is better than Erasmus, it’s more intensive… You actually do something!” That sparks a smile from everyone in the end, but the conversation is not over. The three women leave to enjoy a good meal together and to further discuss their lives, their countries and their common European experience during this hot Bruges summer…
The ‘Intensive Seminar on the EU’ is the Development Office’s flagship training programme which has been organised for the past 17 years. It is targeted at professionals who wish to gain an insight into the EU institutions and decision-making processes. The seminar is divided into the 1-week ‘Compact’, the 2-week ‘Advanced’ and the 3-week ‘Classic’ Programme. The 2011 edition is scheduled to take place on 4-22 July.