Erasmus Days 2021

This year for #Erasmusdays, we decided to promote the Erasmus program among the high school students. Together with 2 foreign Erasmus students in Iasi, Emmanuelle Poinsot from France, Erasmus student at “Gheorghe Asachi'' Technical University of Iași, and Wiktoria Libera from Poland, Erasmus student at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, we promoted the Erasmus+ program in front of students that are in their last year of high school at Colegiul Tehnic “Gheorghe Asachi'' Iași, in a face to face format. Next day, we hold an online presentation for another class, and this time we had even more Erasmus students that wanted to share their experience, Camille Rouyer, France, from TUIași and Milan Keseljevic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Erasmus student at UAIC Iași.

We showed that living an Erasmus experience makes you grow as a person, changes you and makes you discover many things about yourself that you did not know about. This experience is like living a whole new life: it opens your mind, makes you discover that home is not only a place where we are born, but it is every place where we know how to love life by overcoming our fears, and above all by discovering the curiosity we need to open up to the world. Moreover it makes you understand that family is not only about your siblings and parents and those with whom you were living your whole life, but also those who you meet in Erasmus. They become your new, big family.

Because we know that this journey may start with many doubts and questions, like “Will I be up to it?”, “Will I be able to make friends?”, “Will I be able to ,,survive,, on my own from the beginning?”, “Will I be able to live alone with other people from other cultures?”, “Will I get all I need?”, “Will my expectations become true?”, we were really happy to give some answers and we tried to respond to them from our personal experience.

The 78 Romanian students found out more details about the conditions they need to take into consideration, the benefits for their personal and professional development, how they can choose the country or the university for their future exchange. Thanks to Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași and “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iași, we could provide them with recent information about the process.

Moreover, students were really interested in what kind of problems the foreign students encountered as foreigners in a new country, and how they managed to solve them.

Erasmus is not only about country, is about people, meetings, places, events. Iasi became a place for growth and the beginning of their future, it already became home, family and place of the heart.

In conclusion we could say that by these meetings (face to face and online) we succeeded in our main mission, promoting and encouraging students to apply and use this great opportunity as soon as they can. We answered all their questions from our own experience, and we hope we will meet them again in the next few years, but this time we will listen to their own Erasmus experiences.