SIGMA assisted to EAIE 2013, the European conference on internationalization of studies that was held in Istanbul from 10 to 13 September, 2013. EAIE was hosted in the International Congress Centre, and counted with the participation of 4,000 people worldwide, especially university professionals in charge of international relations offices, whose main goal in this event was to promote their universities among other countries.
It was found that despite the emergence of agencies like NAFSA (USA), KAFSA (Korea) or JAFSA (Japan), the only exchange program officially established in the continent is still the European Erasmus. In other countries outside the EU, the exchange programs continue to be strictly bilateral exchanges with universities in the same or different countries.
The European Commission is proposing advances in Erasmus+ program to facilitate and expand European mobility, cooperation projects and political support, as well as presenting Erasmus Mundus (only for masters and Phd from around the world) just to break European barriers.
The conference is an event of networking, where universities participate in models and have stands. With a strong European presence, there were lots of European universities sharing stands with their nationals. There was a strong presence of France and Germany, but also of Central European and Scandinavian countries. Spanish presence was scarce, with only three universities each one with its own stand (Málaga, Canary Islands and Santiago de Compostela), and a shared stand for all Catalan universities. Portugal had a stand for the consortium of universities in the central region, led by Coimbra.
The universities in the UK came with its own brand, just like the Americans whose strategy was similar, only some of them with regional identity (California).
On the other hand, there were high level stands from APU universities (Asia and Pacific), China, Japan, Korea and Australia and India. On the other hand, the only representative of the African continent was South Africa.
Finally, Canada appeared as a national stand, Mexico with some specific universities, and South America revealed its presence as national groups like Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Colombia.
SIGMA used this opportunity to participate in a meeting of the EWP initiative (Erasmus Without Papers), which represents the task force group RS3G of EUNIS (European Consortia for Erasmus mobility solutions) together with other institutions such as university networks (UNICA, Santander Group, Compostela Group), the Erasmus Student Network (ESN) and international program coordinators (ERACON).
