“My Ph.D. project deals with the study of the Croatian language and involves both the realisation of a small Croatian – English digital dictionary, and a teaching internship at the UNIPV Language Centre. When I first became aware of the existence of EC2U I did everything I could to be involved in its activities, intrigued by its feature of being a multilingual and multidisciplinary alliance.

In the last two years, I had the opportunity to participate in different EC2U training events which had a more than positive impact on my Ph.D., both in terms of skills and experiences acquired and in terms of networking.

Thanks to the mobility grant provided by the Virtual Institute of Quality Education, I had the opportunity to attend the first and the second edition of the “New Multilingual Learning and Teaching Spaces for European Campuses” workshop, first organised by the University of Iași (Romania) and then by the University of Coimbra (Portugal).

In addition to discovering two countries and attending workshops on fascinating and current topics (intercultural competence, language policies, linguistic landscapes, etc.), in Iasi, we had the opportunity to attend a three-day intensive course of a European language of our choice under the expert guidance of a native-speaking language teacher from the Universities of the Alliance! I opted for Finnish, which turned out to be a timely choice because I got to learn the basic grammar principles of a fascinating language, but I also met Hanna, a Finnish language teacher at the University of Turku, with whom I have remained in contact and whom I now consider a friend and a colleague.

Moreover, in June 2022, I had the opportunity to participate in the “Machine learning techniques & text processing tools applied to the study of linguistic diversity & cultural perceptions” intensive course at the University of Poitiers (France), where – other than learning a lot about learner corpora and different digital tools at our disposals – I met Dorota, a Polish Ph.D. candidate who studies in Poitiers and works on teaching Polish as a foreign language.

In Coimbra, during the workshop held in November, I also met Ines, Dorota’s colleague and Ph.D. student of Bosnian origin who teaches Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian in Poitiers!

During the workshops we got to talk a lot, for instance about our difficulties, and share bibliographic references and experiences, and then we met all three together at the Winter School on “Multilingualism, European Languages and Societies” held at the University of Turku (Finland) in March 2023, where we all presented the progress of our projects and laid the foundations for a future collaboration aimed at promoting the teaching of minor Slavic languages in our universities.

During these events, I also met Carlos, a Ph.D. student at the University of Salamanca who is in charge of teaching Japanese. We stayed in touch and – when I told him that my Ph.D. course in “Linguistic Sciences” would organise a doctoral conference on the theme What is Salience? in September 2022 – he sent an abstract and was accepted!

In short, participating in these events can really represent a unique opportunity for a young researcher looking for a European network of contacts and interested in understanding what are the job opportunities offered by the various realities involved in the project and finding out how other universities analyse certain topics.

Moreover, given the focus on the needs of Ph.D. students that characterises these events, presenting your work in these contexts is an excellent opportunity to get feedback from more experienced researchers. Finally, for polyglots like myself, having the opportunity to refresh all the languages of your repertoire by talking about the topics that are most important to us is truly a dream.

What can I say, send your application to the next EC2U event and you won’t regret it!”