Pre-Departure:
“Google your future”
Do you know where you are going to work after your studies, including job title & company? If so, then doing an exchange is not as beneficial as for someone who doesn’t have a clue yet. There are many motivations that could lead you to think about an exchange. Friends brag about how cool the parties are in Europe, how many good grades you get at some universities or even that they made friends for life or found that life partner. Those stories make one start a thought process and that’s very important. Google your future means that you should start by looking for topics of your interest online. More specifically, look who publishes in that area of expertise. Where are those people based? Do those institutes or universities offer summer schools or exchange programmes? Are there conferences where they present, which include workshops? For example, I wanted to do an innovation management summer school in London. I found it by chance while I was looking for contact information of a professor. It seemed great. Knowing that there are such workshops, I quickly found more than one seemingly suitable programme by going through Google search with keywords like “summer school”, “academy” “postgraduate workshop”, “economics” and “innovation”. Doing that research made me understand better what I really wanted to achieve. It was getting out there to rub shoulders with bright minds in my area of interest. However, there are fantastic opportunities listed on the PGIO website. So you don’t have to go through all the trouble of finding a suitable programme by yourself. (more…)