By: Maria Olmann
From 12th to 15th January I was lucky enough to be a participant of a regional training course on human resources delivered by two trainers, Andrea Schmelz and Svenja van der Tol, from AEGEE Human Resources Commitee (HRC).
This was my first european event in AEGEE and also my first time travelling all alone, so naturally I was really nervous and excited about the whole thing. It took two planes, a bus and a train to get to Passau, which is a lovely city in Germany that shares a boarder with Austria. I made the mistake of thinking „Oh, my plane leaves at 5 in the morning, so I’ll just save on cab money and take the last bus to the airport and hang out there for .. 5 hours.“ I came to quickly regret that decision as pulling all-nighters and feeling completely ok the next day is clearly a thing in the past for me. My „hangout time“ and whole journey was full of barely 20-minute nap-teases which only made me even sleepier.
When I arrived as one of the first people, I strongly considered skipping the city tour for early birds for a good 3-hour nap, which thankfully I didn’t, because the tour was amazing (and holy god how slippery, after the rain froze!) I got plenty of beautiful pictures of the city and saw the famous place where the three rivers Danube, Inn and Ilz become one.
The organizers greeted us with colorful muffins and really cute welcome bags full of useful stuff. We had Bavarian themed dinner which was delicious even for a vegetarian-ish person like me and the amazing cooking continued throughout the event. We then played some get-to-know games and visited a student pub.
The next day started off with intense and really inspiring HR trainings, we had a lot of discussions in a big group but were also divided into working groups for case studies. Each working group was given a fictional AEGEE antenna with some HR trouble and we tried to help them with our new HR knowledge after each session. My AEGEE-Kartoffelpuffer team was really thorough with great teamwork and many different ideas, I really enjoyed working on the case studies with my group.
Second night we had European Night and read the gossip box which was already kinda full, as one participant pretty much adopted it and was encouraging everyone to contribute to it. So my first European Night rocked, we had impromptu snow fights in the middle of it and everyone was awesome.
After a long day of trainings by the best trainers and an interesting guest speaker from a successful start-up, we had a 2000’s themed party together with Erasmus students. Needless to say it was amazing dancing with these lovely participants and organizers, many of who took the time to look stunning in their themed outfits. The next day I had to leave earlier than the programme ended, but I received so many nice letters, goodbyes and plans to meet again, I was ecstatic, motivated and deeply sad to leave at the same time. Passau, you were truly so much more than expected ❤.
