Erasmus

Hallo!

This post is going to be full of (boring) information about Erasmus. :D What we needed to do before coming to Germany, about the documents and assignments, also about grants and so on. Like everyone already might now, Erasmus is an European exchange programme for university students.

Our process started already in March, when we needed to apply for going for an exchange. We applied only to Cologne Business School, even though our school offered a lot of destinations. We estimate that there were like 50 different places to choose from. We needed to wait approximately two weeks and in the end of March we got a result, that we were accepted and would be the two lucky ones from Finland to go and study in CBS! At the moment when we found out Maiju couldn't stop smiling because it was like a dream come true. (I remember, when I told Jenna about it, she looked actually quite terrified XD)

After a while we got the final acceptance also from CBS and then we started to fill in all the documents: Learning Agreement, Grant Application, Course Registration and Student Dormitory-application. By the way, we sent the dormitory application to CBS in May and they answered that the dorm was already full. So you need to be really quick if you want to get a room from there :)
Filling the documents was a mess: we printed, scanned, filled them like million times again and again and it didn't help that Maiju was in Helsinki and Jenna in Oulu.. :D But eventually we succeeded!

Before we left, we needed to do some pre-assignments. They are part of "Valtteri"-course. That course is mandatory for all students going for an exchange and it is worth 3 credits. There were 6 assignments: CV, presentation about Finland, budget estimation, revising history of Germany, expectations about the exchange and description of language preparation. All the assignments were okay but writing about history of Germany was quite horrible, to be honest :D

Also before leaving here we needed to make a notification to KELA that we are going to stay abroad the next semester. Normally we get study aid 268 € per month, but now that we are staying abroad it is 9 € more :'D jeij....

All Erasmus students get a study grant and the amount depends on the country where you go. Countries are divided to two categories and Germany belongs to category 2. Our Erasmus grant is 210 € per month or 7 € per day. We got 80 % of the grant in September and the rest we will get after returning all the necessary documents (=transcript of records and learning agreement)  to our home university. Furthermore we got a travel grant of 400 € from our home university.
Also it is good to know that our school gives scholarships to students who are going abroad. Maiju applied one (btw it was really easy, only one paper) and got a grant of 300 €.

During the stay here we needed to fill the Learning Agreement again, because there was some changes. We chose our courses already in the spring, but we couldn't fit to those courses and we were put into different ones, so we needed to make a new learning agreement. We actually have been delaying doing that the whole semester, but when we finally did it it took like 5 minutes :'D haha..

When we go back to Finland we need to of course return the documents like mentioned earlier, but also write a report of our exchange. It is going to be in our school's intranet to give information for students going or planning to do their exchange after us :)

We think this was it! Probably not relevant to most of our readers but hopefully someone finds this informative and useful :D

Next post is going to be about exam period here in CBS.
Tschüss!
Maiju&Jenna