What a success! More than 60 graduates of Master’s programmes offered jointly by Finnish and Russian universities took part in the Alumni Meeting organised by the EDUneighbours project in St. Petersburg 24 March 2018.
The day was opened by the words of welcome from the EDUneighbours team, and then the focus-group interviews were conducted for the next two hours. We learnt a lot about different themes of our research including issues such as management of double-degree programmes, motivation for studies in double degree programmes, transnational experiences and trust building, changes in the perceptions of the other, and in general, about the relationship between higher education cooperation and state-to-state relations. The graduates also enjoyed recalling and sharing their experiences with other graduates.
After the interviews, we had a wonderful dinner and graduates had a chance to catch up with their former classmates and to make new friends.
We are grateful to the coordinators from Joensuu and Lappeenranta for helping us in inviting the graduates from their programmes, to all graduates who joined us, and to the Finnish Institute in St. Petersburg for providing us with the beautiful premises. The graduates expressed their wish that alumni meetings like this would become a new tradition for the Finnish-Russian programmes 🙂
The Alumni Meeting, as the whole project, was funded by the Kone Foundation.
