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Sakthidaran M. Prakash
Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme "Smart Cities" at Vilnius Tech
Period of stay: 14 - 21 March 2022 (online), 28 March - 1 April 2022 (in person)
I am studying the master's programme in Mechatronics at the University of Siegen. Recently, I had the opportunity to attend an Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme (BIP) at Vilnius Tech in Lithuania. The topic was based on "smart cities". It was a five-day-long programme. I was funded by ATHENA to attend the BIP. Students from different universities around Europe attended the programme. It was a mixture of different cultures and people speaking different languages and everyone shared their experiences and spoke about their culture. For me, it was really special because I got an opportunity to interact with many international students and the programme was very informative.
The programme was completely based on the future of smart cities, what to expect in the future, and how to prepare ourselves for the future. We had several lecturers from different domains of work explaining us the planning, future technologies, innovations, etc. to be expected in a smart city. Furthermore we had interactive sessions to ask the professors about their work and discuss with them our ideas related to smart cities.
The host institution, Vilnius Tech, took care of us well, and had appointed a coordinator for the programme to guide us through the whole week. They helped us with finding suitable accomodation and appointed a mentor to make it easy for us to know the locality. Vilnius Tech arranged a guided city tour and gave some free time to explore the city which made us know more about their country's rich heritage.
At the end of the programme, we all had to do a small presentation related to this topic and share our views on the topic which we had learned about during the five days. It was a good experience for me to speak in front of a lot of people and to be in a new country among international students. The confidence and the information I have gained during the programme will help me in my career.