Welcome
Early November, we had our 2nd Consortium Meeting. After the inspiring Kick Off at Tampere University in cold and snowy Finland this time we went to the north again -not of Europe, but the north of Italy. Trento welcomed us with clear weather and great food on the Wednesday evening.
Day one
The next day, Thursday the 6th of November, we were pretty busy. In the morning, we met at the department of Sociology and Social Research in the middle of Trento to update each other on the progress in the work packages. And we made plans for the future on workshops and conferences together with the sister projects. Inevitably, we had to take care of a few administrative details.
But then excitement set in. The wonderful Toñi Caro introduced us to the ideas of Living Lab. And totally in style with the concept this was no academic exercise. We started with designing ducks.
And soon were building towers. Imagine – serious academics were equipped with spaghetti, cello tape and a few toffees to erect towers. Which group would have the highest tower. And which structure would last long enough to be measured?
It was very interesting to see the different engineering strategies. Even more interesting, the different ways to organize work and combine the knowledge and talent of all group members and focus them on the shared goal.
Day two
The next day, Friday the 7th of November, we had a keynote on LLMs and how to use and nor to use them in practice. The talk was given by the inspiring Jacopo Staiano who is an ” Associate Professor at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Trento.
Here representatives of our sister projects joined in hybrid ways. Sister projects are EU funded projects working on different aspects of higher education and transitions of young people to labor markets. As we share the goal of supporting young Europeans on their way to a economically independent life it makes sense to cooperate and identify synergies, for example share methodologies, protocols, and data.It was exciting to learn about the different approaches of BRIDGE, EDU-LAB and VETprep to stakeholder engagement and reach-out to policy makers and societal actors. There will be a lot of opportunities to meet, discuss, and work together in the future. And together we took the opportunity to brief each other on our plans and activities.
After a light lunch we hade some working group meetings and then it was time for farewell!
Trento was not only an important step forward for the Next-Up project. It was a pleasant experience and many of us used the afternoon to visit the city.