Three of our commited students talk about their experience with the project.
JOSÉ FREITAS – «Youropia» experience
I’ve got no doubt that the chance of participating in a project like this will be an experience that will stick with me for the rest of my life. With this project, besides exchanging experiences with individuals from 8 different countries, learning and understanding other cultures, improving my knowledge about the European Union and its history, getting to know a new country, I also managed to make friends with who I still keep in contact via Facebook. In my opinion, this project is going to give me return – not only in my personal life, but also in my professional adventures. I say this because with this project I managed to improve two skills, which are very important in the labor market today: language skills and also oral presentation techniques.
I was informed about this Comenius project by my Philosophy teacher, who excitedly presented to us the objectives of the project. Since that day, I was immediately interested to take part in the venture.
The selection procedure consisted on us having to present an oral presentation in English to a group of teachers (judges). The oral presentation consisted on a project for the presentation we would exhibit in Augsburg. We were given the liberty to innovate and to go as far as we could – in my group’s case, we even created a blog to promote our ideas. This blog is still available today, and includes all the work we developed since the day we joined the project until the day we left high school and therefore finished our involvement with «Youropia». In my opinion, the selection procedure was fair. This because only the students who worked hard enough were allowed to travel abroad – which is important, because if we are going to represent our country in some kind of European project we need to choose a good team, composed by people who deserve it.
Looking at the costs and the benefits of the project I can only see one cost – which was the several days we took to develop the project. However, obviously even this cost was worth it, because as stated above it brought me many advantages.
Regarding specifically the trip to Augsburg, I think that the accommodation was positive in terms of conditions, the journey was comfortable and well organized. We were given a lot of free time so that we could get to know the country and get in contact with our partners in the project. On the other hand, I think the activities were badly organized. The main objective of this project is to learn and exchange experiences, not to travel around. This way, I think that there should be a better use of the time to allow all the countries to demonstrate the work they did at home. There should be a higher focus on the educational objective of this project: besides interacting with other cultures, discovering a new country, having fun, developing our English skills, it is essential that at the end of the project we feel that our knowledge regarding the European Union has improved. In my opinion, we were given very little time (only 10 minutes) to make the presentation we had prepared at home (which we took nearly 90 minutes to present to our school community). Half of the work we prepared had to be removed, which I personally didn’t find correct. Besides this, I think that the fact that when we had gone over the time established for very few minutes, we were pressured to finish our presentation. I thought this wasn’t fair, since we put a lot of effort into our presentation and it seemed like that other countries weren’t really bothered about it.
MARIA PIO – Youropia and Me
In the beginning there was a lot of pressure from our philosophy teacher for us to try to be part of this group. Nobody knew what it was and he just kept saying that it would be good for our curriculums, we would meet new people and that on top of it all we could win a trip. Being who I am I accepted, though with a lot of doubt because I would miss classes and tests, nonetheless I was never more thankful than I’m now.
The next phase was the selection, a PowerPoint presentation that was made only by me, to be shown to a group of judges (teachers), I think it’s something that in Portugal was made with effort and sweat, and that in some other countries wasn’t made at all. In Portugal I can say the bar was high, because only people who worked really well went, but in some other countries the selection could have been done more thoroughly so that only the best would go, only people who liked to work, and this is one of the things I can say that wasn’t that fair and that wasn’t planned very well. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t like all the students in the meeting; it only mean that some were not committed enough.
Next up was the trip to Verona and this part, the technical stuff, I can say was very well organized, the host families, the hotel, the plain, etc. Some other things weren’t that well calculate, for instance the time plan didn’t give us a lot of time for extra activities and it was very tight which resulted in a lot of delays and arguments between teachers and students. This aside, we still saw very beautiful things, we heard incredible stories, and we saw mind-blowing dances.
Through all the setbacks and minor inconveniences this has one of the biggest experiences I have had all my life, I not only learned to trust others more, I also learned that I the person I should trust the more is me. In the last weeks before the meeting I’ve seen people quitting and leaving everything for me to do but I also saw people who gave me a helping hand when I needed it the most. I truly learnt to not judge for their first look.
I think it would be very important to choose the right people for this project, because if the project is shut down because of some people it would be awful, this project is truly important for students to meet new people and to see how things work in different countries, to learn to organize themselves, to learn how to work together, to improve English and mostly to have fun.
If I had a final thing to say it’s “thank you” because this experience was once in a lifetime.
ANDRÉ SILVA – My Youropian experience
Youropia is a Project of the European Comenius project, and I can say that it was one of the best experiences of my entire life. Being part of this project made me grow up, not only as a teenager who just visited a new country and interacted with different cultures, which brought me more knowledge about what reality surrounds me, out of my country, but also as a person who I am.
I only attended to the trip to Verona, and received our youropian friends into our school in Torres Vedras, so I can only talk about those two experiences, which are totally different.
In my trip to Verona, I could connect myself more with the other students who took part of the project , stayed at an italian’s girl house for a couple days, and experiencing their routine it’s what really makes us understand what it is like to live in that country. Apart from that, being in contact with multiple different cultures made me know more about those different cultures and respective countries, as well as this is a project that opens doors to be easier to build life in a foreign country.
In Torres Vedras, the most worry you have is to make the foreign students who are visiting your city and school the most comfortable possible, and it’s really different than being the foreign student.
I’ve heard of this project because my philosophy teacher who actually takes part of it told us about it, and made us try to apply for it. For the selection, the applying students had to make a five minute oral presentation about a subject they would eventually like to discuss in this project, which would test their skills. I think it is a fair selection, because it is pretty much what you will end up doing in the country that you are visiting, so who represents better the school were picked.
My impressions about this project was that the friendships that you make, can be really strong, I talked to different many people during my trips, but as expected only one or two still talk to me often, but I can say that it is a really good friendship. The things that could be better, just the time we have to spend in that country!
I really hope that this project continues, I probably won’t be part of it again in the future, but I think who ever has an opportunity to experience this, they really should go ahead.
Youropia - Youth of Europe 
