A student working for EUTOPIA: the peculiar experience of EUTOPIA Week BXL

The fifth EUTOPIA Week: the pilot project entering its last stretch, a time for recollecting on what was achieved and what’s to come

I have been working at CY Cergy Paris University as a communication officer for EUTOPIA since September 2020, in an apprenticeship mandatory to finish my master’s degree in communications. I know all too well the challenges of being a student engaged in EUTOPIA activities while finding time for studying. Still, I also have my responsibilities as a member of the central communication team to attend to. My position in EUTOPIA is, therefore, one of contrasts.

Events like this EUTOPIA Week are the crystallization of this contrast as I get to meet and spend time with many students from all over the alliance, all of whom I would be glad to now call friends, all the while my schedule is stock full of interesting and fascinating events, seminars, and visits that I must pay close attention to fulfil my duties of communicating about them. The very first of those was the Opening Ceremony.

The Opening Ceremony of EUTOPIA Week BXL was the most impactful we’ve ever had and was a great way to kick off the week. With the end of the pilot project of EUTOPIA looming on the horizon, VUB’s rector Jan Danckaert vowed that EUTOPIA shall outlast, as it is “a lever of transformation for our 10 universities”, while EUTOPIA’s Secretary General Nikki Muckle added that “EUTOPIA gives us a voice to be heard on a European level, which our independent institutions didn’t have”.

We looked back at what EUTOPIA has achieved over three years, such as the creation of thirty Learning Communities, the success of the EUTOPIA Science & Innovation Fellowships (SIF), and the enlargement of the alliance to four new universities in the last year… It was also a time to thank the people who made these achievements possible. As is now the tradition in EUTOPIA, VUB’s former rector Caroline Pauwels was awarded a medal welcoming her to the ‘EUTOPIA Academy’ and was thanked for pushing forward the EUTOPIA project and for her devotion to making VUB a truly internationally open university. Unfortunately, she could not be present during the ceremony, so rector Jan Danckaert received the medal for her. Ms Pauwels passed away on August 5th from complications due to the cancer she had been fighting for years. She will be remembered as one of the founders of the EUTOPIA alliance and one of its most vocal proponent.

The highlights of my week: student engagement, from the Knowledge Bazaar to ‘Decolonize Higher Education.’
 

There were too many events for one, or even two people, to see it all during EUTOPIA Week Brussels. So, the communication team from CY split up and explored Brussels individually, only sometimes crossing paths or seeing each other tweet or post stories on Instagram.

My personal journey took me from one end of Brussels to the other, from a historically painted visit of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean on the other side of the Willebroeck canal to the north-west to the VUB Campus facilities in Ixelles in the south-east, without forgetting the Brussels City Hall and the European Parliament building in the heart of the capital of Europe.

The main highlights of my week, of which there are many, come from the engagement of students of the EUTOPIA alliance, like when on the afternoon of the very first day, I attended the closing of the VUB’s Knowledge Bazaar exhibition. The Knowledge Bazaar, presented as a “marketplace of ideas”, was an experimental event where teams of students from the alliance were tasked to bridge art and science, to translate research projects into art. The event and exhibition of most of the results happened online (see HERE), but the VUB used a previously existing relation and partnership with KVS -the Royal Flemish Theater in the heart of Bruxelles- to publicly exhibit their produced works of art, giving life to the Mindblowers exhibition, where I got to meet students from the VUB and the University of Ljubljana who’d participated.