ESNers, meet your future!
by Jesús Escrivá Muñoz, Sara Panis, Stefan Jahnke
T
he Erasmus Student Network (ESN) is a non-formal education provider which empowers its members with many valuable soft-skills. Some examples of the soft-skills ESN offers are: time management, personal networking, teamworking, flexibility and inter-cultural communication. ESN is mainly engaged and acknowledged in the International Education field and many ESNers are nowadays working in International Relations Offices, National Agencies or even in the European Commission. Members of the International Committee for Education (ICE) of ESN have interviewed ESN alumni who are employed in the International Education field thanks to their experiences from ESN. In the following paragraphs you’ll find out how ESN contributes to one’s career and labour-market opportunities.
Adriana Pérez Encinas Adriana Pérez Encinas, from Villafranca del Bierzo (León, Spain) is one of these fortunate persons. She has been living almost all her life in the great city of Madrid, where she enjoyed doing her Bachelor in Translation and Interpreting and a Master in International Relations within Latin America. Now she is 29 years old and works in an International Relations Office in Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She relates to ESN because she joined ESN herself in 2006 right after her Erasmus exchange in Winterthur (Switzerland). There she met great local people who joined a social network to help international students. “This social network was ESN. It was the first time I heard about it. Once I got to know more about ESN, I was astonished by its impact on my life and how much it brought into it.” When she came back to the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, she joined the local section ESN UAM as a member. After only a few months she became the local vice-president. Some months later she became the local president and occupied this position for a couple of years. She even hold the position of National Representative (NR) of ESN Spain and she remembers this part of her ESN career as fabulous. Due to a lack of money, she applied for an internship position in the International Relations Office where she worked for almost two years. Right before finishing her Bachelor´s degree she was completely overloaded with her final subjects, ESN and two jobs. Therefor she had to quit her job in the IRO although she loved it. The rest of the story is this: “When I was about to finish the final subject of my degree, I applied for a free position in the IRO where I had worked for. I was really lucky because of my previous experience there as an intern and my experience as president of ESN UAM which helped me a lot to get the job.” That is how she became the Head of the International Relations Office of the Faculty of Business and Economics at UAM with only 22 years old! She admits that it was hard at the beginning to have so much responsibility, but the soft-skills she developed in ESN helped her a lot. Team-working, organization of events and trips, management, problem-solving and inter-cultural learning are the ESN skills she values the most. “Any advice? Work hard to get where you want to stay. You can reach anything you want with effort and passion and if you put much passion in the things you believe and want it will for sure help you in the future!”