Staff exchange – Karolinska Institutet

By: Emma Hägg, International Coordinator, International Relations Office

In May this year we, Karen Gustafsson and Emma Hägg went to Porto in Portugal together with colleagues from the administration to listen to a presentation of the SUCTI-project. In October we followed up with training in Tarragona.

Porto in May

The presentation in Porto gave us a sneak peak of tools for a course targeting administrative staff. When we went to Porto we already had a vague idea of how this course could be part of the ongoing STINT-funded Internationalisation of the Curriculum (IoC) project in which the importance of engaging administrative staff has been gradually apparent. You can read more about the event in Porto in the blog “Let’s build human towers…”.

Tarragona in October

Now it is time for the sequel…when dates were announced for the first course to train SUCTI-trainers. We, Emma and Karen signed up. The train the trainers would equip us and train us for giving the course to our colleagues. We would be able to work on our presentation skills, test the tools, get the knowledge and discuss internationalisation with colleagues from other parts of the world.

Off we went 20 October to Tarragona and to the Universitat Roviera I Virgili (URV) for a 5-day intense course. URV had been coordinating the project and hence was the host for this pilot, which was the first “train the trainers” course to be carried out outside the consortium after finalizing the project in June.

Turning particpants into champions

Participants came from Spain, France, the Phillipines and us from Sweden and most universities had sent two or three staff to the training. The course was intense and skipped back and forth between interactive activities and theoretical blocks. The diversity in the group gave fantastic added value as we all came from different backgrounds and with different challenges. In the final session where we all gave presentations one of the participants had the each person in the group say a song that would represent how they felt…we all ended up singing karaoke “We are the champions”….need I say more.

Now it is time to get started building that “human tower”…and to integrate interationalisation into the university…starting with a group of our administrative staff in November…wish us “buena suerte”!

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