Together with Unite! into the future

TU workshop for all

2022/01/26

How should the university alliance Unite! continue? This question was posed by the Unite! Team to representatives of all status groups of the TU Darmstadt on January 19, 2022. More than 80 TU members accepted the invitation of the Vice President for Transfer and Internationalization Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jens Schneider to an online workshop. The ideas and suggestions developed are to be incorporated into the follow-up application for further funding within the framework of the European Higher Education Initiative.

After the conclusion of the 4th Dialogue in Barcelona and the announcement of the two new partners – the Graz University of Technology (Austria) and the Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (Poland) – the task now is to submit the follow-up application for further funding within the framework of the European University Initiative.

For the follow-up application, the Unite! Steering Committee has set up two working groups for the follow-up application: the “Unite! long-term strategy” working group, which has updated the Unite! Mission Statement, and the Grant Writing Team, which is to present in a project description the significance of the alliance, its quality, its impact, and the work plan and work packages. The Working Group and Grant Writing Team each consist of the Key Liaison Officers and one other Unite! member from each partner university. Thus, there is some overlap between the two teams. The grant writing team interacts with the Unite! community on a regular basis, for example through internal workshops such as this one.

Since Unite! is supposed to (further) develop from within the universities – with all their status groups – everyone was asked when the Unite! Secretariat and the Unite! leaders at the TU discussed the future design and further development of Unite! at the TU in a university-wide workshop. The more than 80 participants largely covered all status groups. Expectations for the workshop varied: many wanted to learn about Unite!, others wanted to better understand TU's role in Unite!, and still others wanted to flesh out the many existing projects and ideas and sharpen processes.

Breakout rooms actively engaged representatives of TU status groups so that ideas, impulses, and suggestions could be collected from as many people with different viewpoints as possible and directly considered for the follow-up application.

Currently, the grant writing team is working on evaluating the valuable suggestions for the proposal.

"We are pleased with the lively interest in Unite! at our university. The lively participation and productive discussions of the workshop participants have advanced our content and generated important input for the application," Vice President Jens Schneider expressed his gratitude.

The deadline for the new application is March 22, 2022, with a decision expected by the end of July.

mho

About Unite!

Alongside TU Darmstadt as the coordinator,Unite! (University Network for Innovation, Technology and Engineering) also includes Aalto University (Finland), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden), Grenoble Institute of Technology (France), Politecnico di Torino (Italy), Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (Spain) and Universidade de Lisboa (Portugal).

The seven partner universities aim to use the European University to create a trans-European campus for students and researchers with the involvement of regions and companies. The partners have a total of 167,000 students, already cooperate closely in more than 80 EU projects and have exchanged more than 2,000 students in the past five years. The alliance has set itself the goal of combining courses for the benefit of students, breaking down existing technical and administrative hurdles, and thus significantly increasing student mobility. Research will also benefit from the conditions created for larger and easier cooperation, which will strengthen the competitiveness of the European Higher Education Area overall.