EUDRES - BOOTCAMP 2022

The E³UDRES² Bootcamp was hosted in the beutiful Austrian mountains, in St.Jakobs, during 5 days we as students had to come together in work groups to find solutions to 4 different challenges.

This is how i started, alone carried with dreams and hopes yet with no expectations of what would come and be one of the best weeks of my life!

Something that i knew that i was good at and i tried my best to use and connect the group was my communication, the fact that i am optimistic and love challenges, but also love harmony helped me staying connected with my group, sharing my point of view but also helping others that were not that comfortable doing the same. This helped us improved our work and coming up with something special.

This also improved the communication within the group preventing pitfalls during the challenge and pushing us to our limits.

The first task we had to while on the train was to get each others better within our group and outside the group, so we had to come up with things that we all had in common, initially was just about 5 things, but we got excited and was hard to stop.

In the beginning and while preparing to our pitch something we discussed was: what we would love to became or do if we had no limitations?

Something common to each of us that was always popping out in the conversations we had, was somehow very generic but also powerful, even though was kinda cliché we felt it genuinely in our core and it became the moto of our group.

I would like to be the change that i want to see in the world.

Our team was responsible for the task Bridging and sharing talents.

We had previous meeting to get each other better before the bootcamp, so it was easy to connect with them and be comfortable with each other, so it was a easy take off for our team!

When we arrived one of the most interesting activity for me, personally was the one where we had to pick our spirit animal.

It was something i have never thought it before, should i choose something i like? should i choose something that relates to me? some animal that somehow resembles me?

I never though about it.

So we had to choose one animal that would pop up into our main and then saying why we chose that animal.

After so much time thinking i chose the cat, and no it was not just because i love to sleep!

Cats have a lot of history, through culture and time they changed a lot, imagine one time when cats were worshiped by humans.

But my perspective of cats is that it's a very independent animal, who is always patiently and super aware of the surroundings and also loves to sleep!

They are calm in every situation, but also quick to respond.

We all did this exercise and it was very interesting to see not the animal they picked but the reason and meaning behind it.

After many activities and workshops we had during the bootcamp our idea/solution started to ignite.

After many discussions while picking our problem we came up with something that happen to me last year that i had to deal and we realised that a lot of people could relate to such struggle, especially as student.

Last year, during the pick of covid-19 i was searching for an internship abroad for ERASMUS, first of all i saw myself with the dilemma of what type of internship i wanted, should i go to a company, should i do research and if so in what field?

My course is very wide, i can work in wastewater management, waste management, ecology, aquaculture, animal conservation...

So after a lot of thinking and talking with my professors, none of them helped me much, first of all the communication was not smooth and it took a lot to have a response back, so i didn't have the proper guidance that i was expecting to have.

So i started to contact companies and universities randomly, doing motivation letters for each company and university that i contacted and after 5 months of searching for companies/universities, hundreds of emails exchanged, only one yes came out of it.

Wouldn't be easier if i had everything compiled in one platform?

A platform that i could ask someone with experience on the field that i might be interested in, a platform where i could contact directly the universities instead of searching for the head of the department and so on.

Less time expended that's for sure. And this was our starting point.

So our solution to this problem was to create an European wide platform that will bridge a connection between organisations (through company representatives), academics and students.

We believe that we created a platform able to connect people around Europe and this might be a step closer to be the change that we want to see in the world, an Europe more connected.

So during the bootcamp we created a prototype based on what we wanted to built, you can find it on this link: https://maryamaldurra2019.wixsite.com

While the creation of the prototype we build a gantt chart, a financial plan, marketing strategy and a general plan to make this platform work, now and in the future.

Also to help visualise and prepare for the pitch we created a chain of value, where all of group targets can benefit by bridging and sharing talents between other target groups.

A lot of ideias for the future were generated, that will go hand-in-hand with EUDRES projects in future, but for that we wanted that this project continued.

This was our beautiful amazing group, filled with such brilliant minds and diligent hard working people.

We bonded super quickly, thankfully because it was very important during the experiences to exchange inputs and feedbacks on the works that we've been doing during the week.

To wrap this beautiful experience i made an aftermovie of my bootcamp experience, with a more personal approach, to remember all the amazing people i met and to celebrate the amazing experience i had during the EUDRES Bootcamp 2022.