Thoughts on “Studying in the European Union – chance and challenge for international students”

Just finished this work (edited by Katarzyna Hadas) and, as I’ve said before, I’m not hugely convinced by some of what it has to say. That said, it did make me think I might want to explore students’ previous experiences of Europe in my interviews.

The work used Phenomenology to analyse the findings which I want to find out more about to avoid the issues I had with it: namely, the lack of editing editing and explanation of how many replies make a phenomenon.

In Chapter I, Section 7, the report examines the students’ plans for after completing the programme and there is strong anecdotal evidence of students’ wanting to return home to implement changes learnt on their course. This applied to subjects from Energy Storage to Quaternary and Prehistory, from International Health to SEN. In Chapter 2, there’s an analysis (with some of the few statistics in the work), of reasons why students joined an Erasmus Mundus programme; 62.18% answered ‘very important’ to ‘career opportunities after completing the course’, 28.15% ‘important’, 7.14% ‘not very important’ and 2.52% ‘unimportant.’ This echoes my research’s findings that students are motivated for personal reasons ahead of altruism. Now there is no ‘changing my home context’ reply to this and the replies cover everything from local culture, weather (?!) and finding information on the internet. So, whilst I am not convinced by the question asked as a tool, I am sure I will quote the findings to back up my own.

This report comes closer than many in addressing my research questions but due to the lack of analysis, I am convinced I can take my work further than this. Unlike the official evaluations of Erasmus Mundus, it asks questions which are tied into the original aims of the programme and provides an interesting starting point.