1 year before Erasmus

So first of all let me introduce myself a little bit. My name is Valeryia and I am 20 years old. I was born in Minsk, Belarus. Currently living and studying at the SWPS University in Warsaw, Poland.

From January till June 2015 I was living and studying at the Universitat de Vic, in Barcelona, Spain. That was a wonderful time, but also a rather hard one. But I will come to this story later. I have created this blog in order to share with you all the information about the city of Vic, as well as Barcelona, to tell you about the university and everything that could be useful and interesting. I hope that you will enjoy my writings. Do not hesitate to write comments and questions. I will be happy to answer all of them.

Before Erasmus

Before moving to Warsaw I even did not know what does Erasmus means. I should be honest, I even did not hear of it. But while searching out the information about my future home university I found out that they are dealing also with the Erasmus program, which gives a lot of opportunities to students. Belarus is not a highly developed country in terms of education and of course I even could not dream that one day I will be studying in Spain.

The process of recruitment

I do not like routine work and preparing documents I consider to be one of it. However, I realised that studying abroad is very important for me. So I was trying to do my best and I devoted a lot of time for preparing the documents. But the list of documents was so big...

1. At first you need to fill in the form. The form will include all your personal information. The most important part of the form is that you need to write 3 universtities you would like to go in the correct order. That means that on the first place you need to put the university you would like to go most. 
   
   My list was:  - The University of Winchester
                        - Universitat de Vic
                        - The University of Malta.
   
   The University of Malta was not in the list of proposals from the SWPS University (every university has a list of places they propose their students to go, as they need to have a contract with them). I was dissapointed as the list of my university was not so big. So as I mentioned earlier Malta was not in the list, but I decided that I can try to write a letter to the university and get a chance to go. No answer during 3 months period. So that meant that automatically I have lost a chance to go to one of the universities from my list. Two universities were left. 
2. Motivation Letter
3. Three recommendation letters
4. Certificate (TEFL, IELTS). P.S. In my case the university alloud me to bring just the confirmation from one of the professors that I am good enough in English and I can participate in the Erasmus+ program
5. Certificates about your volunteer work (as far as I know they are not obligatory, but of course it is a big plus, I had two of them)
6. Confirmation that you have not received any scholarship before

After all your documents are ready you will have to wait about two-three months in order to hear the final decision: will you go or not; which university will you go.

I uploaded all the documents in December and I got the answer at the beginning of March. 

Yeeeeeah!!!! I am going to Spain, Barcelona!!!!

(http://usr.uvic.cat/bloc/2013/04/11/lextens-mon-digital-de-la-universitat-de-vic/)

Photo gallery