Soft Skills in St. Peterburg
Emotional intelligence, negotiation skills and critical thinking were just some of the training topics in the focus of the Short Summer Course of AEGEE-Sankt Petersburg. The Summer University “The Big Training Theory” took place from 29 June to 7 July 2019.
GT: What was your Summer University about?
Maria Eselevich, main organizer: Our Summer University focused on important soft skills. The participants got new information about these skills, learned how to train them and to implement them in their future. Of course, we didn’t forget about the cultural part and tried to show the participants as much as possible of St Petersburg and surroundings.
GT: How many participants and how many organisers did you have?
Maria Eselevich: We had 20 participants, 8 members in the Coordination Team and a big group of helpers!
GT: What were the greatest thematic programme highlights of the SU?
Maria Eselevich: Speaking about the training part, we started from the traditional “What is AEGEE?” session, then we had workshops about Emotional Intelligence, Negotiation Skills, Public Speaking, Cognitive Flexibility, Critical Thinking and Creativity. The final session was about writing a CV and how to include AEGEE in it. Apart from soft skills we also had workshops about Russian language and Russian dance, which were always super funny. In the cultural part we visited the main museums, travelled to eco-path and Finnish bay beach, explored the residences of Russian Emperors and had a lot of fun!
GT: What were the funniest or most exciting moments?
Maria Eselevich: One day we had a “party” in the police station because one participant had their jacket stolen. Everything ended up well, the jacket was found, so now we remember it as an adventure! The other exciting moment was the boat party and watching the drawbridges, it is always a very memorable moment both for participants and organizers.
GT: How was the group of participants? How did you manage to integrate them?
Maria Eselevich: The group was great, we had a lot of new members of AEGEE so I hope they got motivation to become more active in the organisation. To integrate all the participants we played a lot of games and also had a big table at the hostel where we marked the most active people of the workshops with stickers. We also had stickers for bad behaviour so everybody was motivated to take part in the sessions and get their good stickers.
GT: How was the cooperation and mood in the team?
Maria Eselevich: The participants fastly found the connection between each other. It was a group of people who more likely choose to sit and talk to each other than to party and drink till 6 am and this is super cool! The thing I want to mention here is that all the participants actively participated in every workshop so this was the perfect team for our SU. In the organizers team we had a good communication and solved all problems fast. It was our second event as a team so we learned from our previous mistakes.
GT: How was the romance factor of the SU? Where there many couples and what were the highlights from the gossip box?
Maria Eselevich: The romance factor was not so strong but we had 1-2 couples… A lot of inside jokes, though, were born in the gossip box, for example almost all gossips were signed by the name of one participant, a truly gossip king.
GT: How successful was the SU overall?
Maria Eselevich: The SU was very successful from my point of view. We had the amazing team and worked and partied together a lot! Everything was in its right place.
GT: Anything you would like to add?
Maria Eselevich: Hope to see all the participants on other AEGEE events. You rock, guys!
