Laura Garcia Rueda is a very energic and positive girl from AEGEE-A Coruña, she has a lot of experience on the local level ( she is currently the secretary of her local) and she has already worked with SUCT becaming a SUpporter for it this past year.

The AEGEEan : Can you introduce yourself for those who don’t know you?

Laura : I’m Laura from A Coruña, a beautiful city in the northwest of Spain. I studied oceanography and now I’m going to start my masters’ in environmental management. I really love music: Arctic Monkeys, Oasis, Blur, The Beatles… Brit pop and alternative music in general (also Spanish music). I like to go to music festivals and enjoy the beauty of music having a good time with friends. I’m a cinema lover, a supporter of my Deportivo de La Coruña, always with a smile in my face, positive, and someone who never gives up. Contact me if you are interested to know more about me.

What valuable lessons did studying the ocean give you, that you would apply in your work for SUCT?

After several years studying, I think I have acquired a working methodology that is very necessary when you have to get involved in a project like this. Not only the habit of studying and working that the bachelors’ can give you, but it’s the amount of teamwork that I have done which has prepared me to know how to work on a team. Taking care of the ocean, of the animals, the samples to make measurements is like taking care of all our organisers, you have to be concentrated, be very careful in order to have the best response from them.

Why did you apply for SUCT? Especially, can you tell us why did you decide to run as Project Manager?

I’ve applied for SUCT because for me the SU project has a lot of potential to make the association more known, get and motivate members. A unique experience which brings the opportunity to get out of your comfort zone and, finally, develop more skills once you’re involved in AEGEE. I have chosen project manager because I consider that my experience (being main organiser, helper and participant of different SUs) has gave me a clear understanding of the project. Furthermore, after being participant in some training events (such as Develop Yourself 3 and SUPS in Skopje, among others), I have gained the necessary skills to be a good leader, be able to work within a team and manage it and also to solve conflicts.

In your programme you said that you want to improve the collaboration between SUCT and AEGEE-Academy, in which way?

As main organiser of a SU and having contact with many experienced members from my local and others, I could learn that there is a lack of good trainers and, for this reason, trainings in the Summer Universities. So, I would like to keep more in touch with them and, as much as we can, try to have some agreements to motivate more locals to ask for trainers and, also, more trainers to attend SUs and deliver sessions. We can also work together in the compulsory content for the SUs to make it more attractive for everyone and be able to give content and fun to the participants and organisers. If we are able to give that, the result will be that more people will want to join AEGEE after their SU.

How do you envision the celebrations for the 30th anniversary of SU? Not every day is the 30th aniversary of someone, so why not celebrate it?

I think is a good opportunity to make a great tribute to the Summer University Project and we all know that the current SUCT is preparing something special, so wait a bit and give me the opportunity to surprise you a bit! I can promise that it will be something unforgettable!

If you could choose just one big aim to improve SUCT, what would you choose and why?

The most important thing that SUCT needs to improve is being closer to the locals and other European bodies, in order to help them in a better way, and have more comunication with the European Bodies in order to have more quality in the Summer Universities. They were improving a lot in this sense but, as main organiser this year, I can say that there is room for more improvement.

What are your aims and hopes for SUCT?

I hope that we can continue doing a very good job inside SUCT, rather improving it, achieving all the proposals in ours programmes, or at least letting them have a start. Combining the knowledge, experience, motivation and good relation that we will have in our team, I think that we’ll be able to make a huge work, to contribute a lot in this project and to help organising, once again, the summer of the life of hundreds of young people.

Questions from the Network

You said in your application that you want to keep SUpporters and activate them more. Do you have a programme for that? What exactly, and how can they support you? In your opinion, why right now SUpporters are not so active?

About SUpporters, I was thinking about some improvents to include in our programme: organise more Skype meetings with them, use the survey to the Network that I also want to implement to make guidelines and useful documents in order to make those task more easy. They can support us in a different ways. Working as a team, sharing tasks, or they could even contribute with their own experience and knowledge, in case they have it. If they won’t have enough yet, the knowledge transfer will be fundamental in order to involve them in our work with more confidence. I think that now they are not very active because they are not enough motivated. We should motivate them more, being more communicative and interactive with them.

You can read her full candidature here.

Written by Paola Letizia Murru, AEGEE-Cagliari

There could be nothing more straightforward than a Local Training Course: it is a course, it is local, and you will be trained. Nevertheless, the most generic names can have the most varying results, and, because of this, no single LTC is the same. This is why the AEGEEan sat down with Alejandra Piot from AEGEE-A Coruña, Raquel Pastor from AEGEE-Burgos, Katha Schwerdt from AEGEE-Dresden and Piotr Stawicki from AEGEE-Poznań, to reflect on the respective LTCs that their local organised in the past half year.

The AEGEEan: Could you give us a short summary of your LTC?

Participants and Trainers at the LTC in A Coruña

Alejandra: Our LTC was based on the differences between all the regions of Spain. It was called “LTC: 8 apellidos Gallegos” (8 Gallician surnames), based on the Spanish film “8 apellidos vascos” (8 Basque surnames). We made an LTC1 with workshops about what aegee is: on a European level, regarding event management, explaining step-by-step what a board does and more. There were only two trainers, Javier Ramírez (AEGEE-Las Palmas & AEGEE-Madrid) and myself (AEGEE-A Coruña). At first we expected to be more, but there were many problems for them to come. Nonetheless, it worked really well to work together and the participants were really interested in the workshops. Afterwards, they congratulated us on doing a good job. David Mezquita and Marcos Puente, both from AEGEE-A Coruña, also helped out. Additionally, we organised activities, such as hiking and gymkhana. There were more or less ten organisers, some of them were newbies, but they did a good job.

Raquel: In October, we organised an LTC, which was placed in Celadilla, a village near Burgos. We decided to organise an LTC after the summer to explain to the newer members that AEGEE is more than a Summer University or a meeting with old friends after the summer. The newer members were not our only objective though; a new board was just elected and a training weekend was the best idea to consolidate the new working group. Furthermore, we had great trainers like Anita from AEGEE-Burgos, who shared her evolution within AEGEE with us and Eloy from AEGEE-León, who explained the Erasmus+ programme to us.

Piotr: Our LTCs always last for three days and their topic is always the same, event management. The programme is divided into one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half-hour long workshop modules and cases about a particular part of event management, such as team building, event promotion, FR, budgeting and more.

Katha: Our LTC took place from the 22nd till the 24th of April. The title of the weekend was “Together to get there II”, since it was the second LTC held by our antenna. The aim was to train the new members on how to be an active AEGEE member, organise events and to show which possibilities AEGEE offers.

Participants at the LTC in Burgos

Roughly how many people visited your LTC?

Raquel: We had 20 participants from AEGEE-Burgos, and some friends from other antennas who assisted us during our last LTC. A huge number of participants of that LTC are now active members that try to collaborate with the antenna and its activities. Some want to join as many events as they can; their next stop will be the Agora in Bergamo.

 Piotr: At our last LTC, there were 20 participants and an additional of about 15 people from AEGEE as trainers or organisers, but sometimes we can have up to about 25 to 30 participants. We organise LTC1 and LTC2: in our LTC1, there are usually about ten to 20 participants, mainly externals and in our LTC2, there are usually six to twelve participants, both members of AEGEE as well as other organisations who have some experience in event management.

Katha: We were twelve participants in total, it was a good amount of people for our team building and icebreaking games. Also we had a “What is AEGEE” workshop and had a lot of fun on the night walk, PR, project management and conflict management workshop, as well as in the short introduction to fundraising.

Alejandra: We had, more or less, 25 participants, some of them AEGEE members, others were externals. Right now, some of these externals have become members of our antenna, so we are really happy. They were so interested in everything we talked about.

How did you attract members to join your LTC?

AEGEE-Poznań’s LTC, “Your success, our passion!”

Piotr: Our members usually only take part in LTC2s and we try to attract them by having a diverse range of topics, workshops and trainers. Thanks to this, our members can participate in a couple of LTCs and each time learn something else –as long as there are new trainers, workshops and activities-.

 Alejandra: We promoted it as a formal event, which also included team building exercises and attractive activities. We send mails though the University Mail Server, because we thought that some people would want to come with us and we were right. Some people read our email and replied, asking us for more information. I think we did really well, because it was a good way to catch new members.

Raquel: Of course the main attraction of an LTC is to spend a weekend meeting friends and new people. However, active members would pass on their motivation to our newer members every day during the course. That is why our last LTC was so successful, because everybody wanted to know about AEGEE and its versatility.

Written by Willem Laurentzen, AEGEE-Nijmegen