News

The first annual meeting of the Natural Sciences Subject Committee took place on May 27/28 at the Saint Petersburg State University, Russia. The Committee members enjoyed the warm hospitality of the host and Vice Rector for International Relations, who welcomed them on the first meeting day and expressed his enthusiasm regarding SPSU participation in CE. Choosing SPSU as a meeting venue was largely due to the fact that such an impressive university has to be more actively involved within the CE network, since it has so much to offer to both students and professors.

As it has now become the tradition, the Natural Sciences Subject Committee held its presentation of Campus Europae to prospective students from the Natural Sciences faculty, which was kindly delivered by Anna Datsun, a CE alumni from the Student Parliament. The presentation was very well received and the SPSU studies did not shied away from asking question to the professors from the partner universities in attendance!

This meeting was special for many reasons. First of all, it marked the beginning of active participation of the University of Alcala, Spain, together with expanding the SPSU participation from only Physics sub-committee to Biology. An equally important milestone of the meeting was the participation of Prof. Lembit Pallas from the Tallin University of Technology, Estonia, which might be the beginning of activating the fourth workgroup within the subject-committee: environmental sciences. The Committee is definitely growing and we are witnessing the motto of expanding coming to reality. This naturally sets a more ambitious goal in front of the Committee: to raise the number of CE movers in the academic year to come.

Issues discussed at the meeting were various: from the usual concern around the matrices workflow, mobility and ECTS recognition, to equally active participation of all members. The added value of the meeting was having Prof. Estela Pereira who introduced several fresh ideas and supported the Committee’s work in every possible way. The unique opportunity that CE offers for the work of subject committees needs to be used to widen the scope of collaboration and improve the quality of mobility at all participating universities and in the areas not covered by the subject committees. Furthermore, enlarging the activities within the SC is our common goal. Some of the possible activities to achieve this were discussed: develop joint masters (either within a subject area or within interdisciplinary domains); develop joint research projects that may be used to offer master thesis work well adapted to a master program, or even to joint PhDs; compare and discuss the conditions for recognition of thesis work (total or partial number of credits); develop the characterization of learning outcomes for a specified degree and eventually relation with the EQF; joint project in procedures to evaluate student workload and comparison of results. The proposals deserve future consideration and mutual effort in seeking practical ways for their implementation. The dynamics and frequency of the committee meetings still remain to be discussed and eventually agreed upon to best satisfy the need for the continual and successful work.