Why organise a study tour or event in Brussels?
Coming to Brussels can be time consuming and doesn’t always fit with your agenda. Nevertheless, it can be interesting to invest some of your time to do so. And this is exactly how you should look at it: as an investment.
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Coming to Brussels is a good way to get informed by experts and project officers from the European Commission and other relevant organisation that are located in Brussels (e.g. EFTA, well-performing universities, NorCore and others).
That way you can ask questions directly to the people dealing with the matter of your concern directly. Afterwards you are able to refer to the workshop in case you want to get in touch with the people you discussed with at the event as a starting point of your conversation.
Attracting people and inviting speakers
When organising a bigger event in Brussels yourself where external participants (non-UiB) are also welcome, you can attract a variety of people with different backgrounds: fellow researchers, people from the European Commission, stakeholders from non-governmental bodies. All these people with different backgrounds will come to you and start a discussion on the common topic, but quite often from a different point of view. And this can be very enriching for your own research. Using those contacts at a later stage can help you getting involved in future (European) research projects. In the end, involvement in project proposals always starts with the network you have.
The Brussels Office will help drafting an interesting programme and arranging all the selected speakers.
Practical assistance
You will also get assistance with the practicalities of organising your tour, like suggesting hotels, taking care of the catering and arranging the restaurant. When organising a bigger event yourself, you can also get assistance with the practical aspects like finding a venue or contacting caterers.
For every aspect of the organisation that you need, you can count on The Brussels Office for help.
Organising meetings in the Brussels Office
The Brussels Office is located in the heart of the European neighbourhood in Brussels. The office has a meeting room that can be used by everyone affiliated to the UiB. This can be convenient to hold a meeting with project partners to discuss about a new proposal or in case you want to meet people located in Brussels. The advantage of Brussels is the central location and that it is well-connected with most places in Europe.
The Brussels Office will take care of all the aspects linked to the meeting like providing coffee and catering, making sure you have all the material you need or arranging a restaurant for the group. That way the only thing you have to concentrate on is the meeting itself.
Examples of study tours that took place
- the leadership of the Department of Clinical Science
- the UiB Communication service
- the UiB HR Department
- the post doc students of the Faculty Medicine and Faculty
- the students of the department Administration and Organization Theory
As you can see in the examples above, a large variety of groups passed by Brussels. For all of them, a tailor-made programme was offered to the participants in which they could go in directly dialogue with the invited speakers. This gave them much better insight in the topics that were tackled and it will give them easier access afterwards to those people.
