BEST Chalmers

Consider being a poor student but still get the opportunity to travel abroad inexpensively with all expensive paid for and at the same time be taken care of by nice local technical students. Does it sound too good to be true? BEST (Board of European Students of Technology) which is a network between students at 80 different technical universities in Europe. The idea started in a Swedish student union sauna. Someone said, “What a great place this is, we are in the middle of nowhere”, we have a lake, canoes, beer and so close to the university. Moreover the rent is like nothing, think if there are other university with same facilities?” In fact there exist many such cool facilities, but how do you find out about them and more important how would you get access to them? The answer is simple, thought BEST-Courses!

BEST Chalmers Summer Course 2008

The local group best pay for almost everything when it’s a course on education. This is because it’s pretty easy to find sponsors and grant which aid these kinds of international projects for youth. For a half year the local group plan schedule, accommodation, activates, restaurants, excursions, t-shirts etcetera. Everything is included and sometimes you will also get refund for the trip, but is not promoted in order to not get unserious people to apply.

The organizers of the host university elect the students by motivation letters in the size of about an A4. The organizers aim to make the group as diverse as possible and at the same time equal number of male and female participants. BEST strives to develop the students and their international understanding. We make it possible for student that never been outside the country to get VISA’s and explore Europe. Except this the organizer often ranks the motivation letters by three things; Motivation to come to the city/country, motivation of subject and their personality. The last thing is really important because the organizers want to have a fun week as well. They are doing everything for free, BEST is a non-profit association. So if there are participants that are great in playing guitar, seem to be funny, know how to drink a beer in 3 seconds or has another passion this can determine which among the good motivation letters that get selected. But it’s not that difficult to be selected.

2006 I went to an exciting ski tip to Austria. It was the local BEST group of Vienna which arranged a trip to their university ski hut at Mönichkirchen. Food, accommodation, ski/snowboard rental, ski pass, activates as well as a pub crawl in Vienna was included. Moreover they had invites some BESTies as co-organizer who wanted to be ski-instructress. However for leisure eevents like this there is a fee. The co-organizer got everything for half price while we had to pay 250 Euro. I flow with Wizzair to Budapest, train to Vienna, Ryan air From Gratz to Amsterdam and finally Flyme between Amsterdam and Gothenburg. All together 60€. At that time the Euro were around 9sek which means I only paid 3000sek for the whole trip. I decided to go for snowboard since I’m really good at Skiing. After a lot of fallings and great help from a Czech BESTie I started to handle it. My spinning trousers helped a lot to not get bruises.

We were 21 participants and 12 organizers. It’s really great and unique experience, different from day-to-day school life. A few of the participants (including me) decided to join best when they got home which mean I meet a couple of them again. One girl from Iceland promoted my formula student project by putting a link on an Icelandic news site with the title “Sweeds are building a Formula Car.” This made 3 thousand unique visitors (different IP’s) from Iceland. (Note that this is 0.95% of the Icelandic population!). Another girl from Portugal became my tenant while I went as exchange student to the Netherlands. Last recently I meet one of the organizers during my visit to Romania.

Snowboarding at the BEST Leisure Event in Austria.

What BEST offer is really unique and that’s why I have decided to spend so much time with it. Currently I’m the president of BEST Chalmers and I hope I will be able to get some Sweeds to join the committee. It’s important to also note that you can join best even if you don’t plan to travel. If you motivated to work with international development and like hearing about funny traveling stories you are for sure welcome to contact us! To end this page I would like to list the best event which I have attended since I started Chalmers.

• 2005 March: BEC Sofia – participant
• 2005 June: SpC Gothenburg, Yacht Design – Co-organizer
• 2005 Sept: BEC Zagreb – Co-organizer
• 2005 Nov: RM Aalborg- participant
• 2006 Feb: LE, Beat the snowflakes Slovakia, Tureca – participant
• 2006 March: RM Reykjavik- participant
• 2006 June: SpC Gothenburg, Yacht Design- Main organizer
• 2006 July: SC Waterloo Canada, Automotive Technology – participant/co-organizer
• 2006 Aug: CE in Gothenburg with Thessaloniki – organizer
• 2006 Nov: RM Tampere – participant
• 2006 Nov: PM Ghent – Delegate
• 2007 Jan: JAM Torino – participant
• 2007 Feb: LE The slopes are still alive, Mönichkirchen – participant
• 2007 March: CE in Istanbul with Porto – participant
• 2007 March: RM in Stockholm – topic owner
• 2007 June: Sympsium, E-learning – organizer
• 2007 Aug: SC, Aircraft Design, Brno – participant
• 2008 Feb: CE, Eindhoven<>Helsinki, Eindhoven – visit
• 2008 Feb: Reunion, Aircraft Design, Istanbul
• 2008 April: RM, Gothenburg, Co-organizer
• 2008 June: SC, Gothenburg, Organizer
• 2008 July: BEC, be Practical, Ljubljana, Participant
• 2008 July: SC, Applications of micro- and nanotechnology, Eindhoven, Visitor
• 2008 Oct: RM, Lund, Delegate
• 2008 Nov: PM, Bucharest, Delegate