YUFE Town Hall in Rijeka, Croatia
YUFE – Young Universities for the Future of Europe – is an EU project that aims to envision, plan and partially realise a new European university from the ground up. It’s a consortium of young, research-oriented universities and non-university partners from all over Europe, including the University of Bremen. YUFE is also about students, actively involving them in shaping this future-oriented project, including the Uni Bremen students Fahmida Yasmin and Bengisu Özyiğit, two of Bremen’s three YUFE student representatives. They contribute to the project’s work packages and were present at YUFE’s mid-February Town Hall event, the consortium’s most recent annual assembly, in Rijeka, Croatia.
In Rijeka, Fahmida Yasmin was involved in consultations with the other European partner universities on the YUFE project’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion work package. A very lively exchange, which also dealt with how European values can be anchored in the future joint university. "We are aware of the legacy of the colonial past in Europe and now we are trying to broaden the horizons, in the sense of diversity that excludes no one," reports Ms Yasmin. She comes from Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and is about to complete her English-language, research-oriented master's degree in Physical Geography: Environmental History in Bremen.
Bengisu Özyiğit came to Bremen from the Turkish capital Ankara. She started her English-language master's degree in Transnational Law at Uni Bremen last autumn. For YUFE she works on the Student Journey work package. "Here we develop ideas and concepts as to what the general conditions of this new European university should look like for students in the future," she says. In Rijeka, the main focus was on how YUFE’s communication and marketing should be designed in order to attract students from all over Europe to the new university.
The two international students do not receive any credit points for their engagement with YUFE. Maybe that will change in the future, but at the moment the two are receiving no compensation for their work there. But they know that they are taking part in one of the most exciting future-facing projects in higher education and with their new contacts in a dozen countries, they are creating their own personal European network.