Peak event report: UPF students

Hello!

Before we begin, we would like to introduce ourselves. We are the UPF team: Maria Calvet, Maria Teresa Tous and Lidia Baeza. This is our first post in the blog and we dedicated it to a global assessment of last month's Peak Event in Paris.

• Why did you join?

The three of us were contacted by Professor Alfons Aragoneses in September, even before starting the academic year. We went for a coffee all together and he presented the initiative to us: conducting a research project revolving around the common theme of the conference, minority rights through history within a legal framework. Being law students and also very involved in the academic international life in university, we thought that a learning community would be an interesting thing to be a part of, as it seemed something very new for us. Also, neither of us ever says no to learning opportunities, so we did not hesitate one minute to join. 

Months later, our professor and tutor Alfons gave us the news about the peak event and it was such a good incentive to keep on working hard and be extremely motivated to do a great job.

• What are you working on?

We are currently working on the project that we presented during the Peak Event, “Tradition daring Modernization: the Protection of the Elites through Historical Catalan Law”. We are now focusing firstly on bringing our research a step further, focusing on the use of customary law and how it affected women, and secondly on the connection between the protection of catalan regional law and the actual Catalan Civil Code. 

Furthermore, we are analyzing several ways of connecting our research with other presentations, such as the ones from Belgium and Slovenia, exploring the whole concept of minorities and the position of the elites in the development of the State.

• How have you been working until now? What is meant by connected campus-learning?

Since we started working on our project we figured that we did our best when we did it together. We’ve been scheduling weekly meetings at university, sometimes to discuss the topic, others read materials…our meetings never look the same but working together is what works best for us. 

One of the things that we have valued the most is the fact that each of us would add specific value to the research project. We are studying the same degree, but the three of us come from different backgrounds and have had a variety of learning experiences at university. This has been surely interesting, in the sense that our experiences have merged together and we have had the opportunity to learn from each other.

• What is the added value of meeting at the peak event?

For us, the added value of meeting at the peak event - might sound cliché- was meeting all of the other students taking part in the learning community. After almost two years of our academic lives taking part mostly online, it is needless to say that there is nothing like face to face meetings. We believe the dynamic of the event would have been so much different if it had been online.

On another note, face-to-face interaction facilitates the exchange of ideas, as it makes it a more organic and natural process. We have had the opportunity to discuss our topic with other students and we enriched our work with many points of view that had either remained unnoticed for us or that we had not considered to be as important. 

• What did you learn from the others? 

It was very interesting to learn about the academic culture of other European universities, from the way they approach their projects, to the relationship they share between professor and student. 

As an addition to that, we could share our ideas and objectives for the future, being able then to learn about different opportunities, and discovering how the access to different jobs works in each of our countries, being truly different. 

• How was the interaction with lecturers/experts?

The experts were a very positive source of information. In addition to their analysis of the individual projects, they provided ideas and options for the continuation of new projects, linking the papers of different universities between them, in order to reinforce this idea of cooperation between communities.

We would have particularly enjoyed having them around in person, as the communication would have been more fluid and we would have had the chance to further debate our topics with them, as their participation was limited to short interventions.

• Is this different from what you would do in the standard curriculum?

So different in many ways! The three of us have been participating in various extracurricular activities at university. However, this is the first time that we have had the opportunity to attend a conference and present our research in front of other students. These kinds of exchanges are highly motivational, as they push you out of your comfort zone and incentivize you to further broaden your knowledge.

• Do you see multilingualism as a benefit? If so, how would that play out in this specific case?

We would argue that although we consider multilingualism as a benefit, in this specific case, the true lesson was that there are many and different ways to communicate with other people. 

Moreover, it was exciting to meet new people and discover how we were able to communicate between us in different languages, as we shared some in common. On the other hand, it was also enriching trying to learn new languages, and pushed us to value multilingualism when learning as a community.