were so similar to each other and how both locals had such tight relations,” remembers Felipe Gonzalez Santos (AEGEECoruña). At present, he has moved from his hometown to Brussels, where he is an intern in the office of one of Members of the European Parliament (MEP). He also contributes to AEGEE in a much higher level both assisting the international board as the Policy Officer of Youth Participation and as the project manager of YOUrope Needs YOU!, which in 2009 won the Charlemagne Youth Prize. Thanks to his first SU and his following AEGEE experiences, Felipe has now increased his self-confidence to be in any international settings and join new start-ups.
SU helps to get a job Also Michele Turati (AEGEE-Brescia) has various stories to tell and he opens up with mentioning a time when he got hired to organise Summer Schools after an employer found his name on a SU press release. Michele (or Mickey for friends) joined AEGEE back in 2003, started going to his local weekly meetings and that summer went to a summer university in Craiova. Ten years later, he is still helping out his local. That was the case also back in 2010, as he tells us. I was helping AEGEE-Brescia’s SU writing a press release for a local newspaper. One person read that article, found my number in an indirect way and asked me if I would like to organise a Summer Schools for him, dealing with an American University. I said “yes” and begun that working experience the following week. I continued it for two years. His own first SU experience was not the best one, but it motivated him to stay in the organisation and organise one himself to see if he could do any better. And he could! This is what Michele has to say about SU in a nutshell: “It is a 2-week experience of something you will only understand how good it was for your career once it is over” Although at the moment he is living and working in Wroclaw, Poland, Michele still remembers his days back in Italy and confirms that AEGEE showed him how Europe should ideally look like and what we all should do to achieve this ideal.
20
Twenty-Five Years of the Summer University Project
2003’s front cover of the Summer University Booklet