The European Universities Student Ambassadors’ Forum (EUSAF), organised within the EUC Voices project, serves as a vital platform for representatives from European University Alliances (EUAs) to share insights on the future of higher education and explore ways to further improve and innovate within the EUAs.
The 2025 edition took place at SGH Warsaw School of Economics from the 4th to the 6th of September. This year, Francisca Albuquerque, PhD candidate in Engineering and Public Policy at the University of Porto, represented the EUGLOH International Student Board (ISB) at the event. She shares her experience, so that more students from the EUGLOH community feel motivated to participate in the EUGLOH Alliance and shape the future of the nine partner universities.
Francisca's story
As a representative of the EUGLOH ISB, attending this forum was an essential part of our mission to learn from peers representing other EUAs and gather best practices to inform policy and implement innovations at the EUGLOH Alliance level.
The forum’s discussions were grounded in the ambition of fostering student engagement and a sense of belonging within our respective alliances. Representatives from various alliances presented concrete best practices, ranging from the allocation of dedicated budgets for student initiatives to the implementation of Alliance Games to promote coopetition and cross-campus sportsmanship.
A recurring theme was the inclusion of students in governance structures, with many alliances granting student representatives a seat and a vote on executive and governing boards, so that students can contribute to co-creating the strategy and operations of the alliances. This focus on student empowerment was further underscored by the success of local task forces that facilitate interdisciplinary bottom-up initiatives, ensuring student activities truly reflect our interests and needs.
I also realised how crucial it is to design a seamless onboarding process, both locally and internationally, to help new students integrate into our communities.
Participation in international forums such as EUSAF is a key mechanism for the EUGLOH Alliance to gather data and insights, as well as to connect with peers from other alliances across Europe. It gave me a unique opportunity to look beyond the ISB internal processes, spot opportunities for innovation, benchmark our efforts against those of our peers, and learn from the successes and challenges they face.
It is in this context of learning and shared purpose that the participants now co-create a collaborative policy report, connecting the dots across the perspectives of various alliances and disciplines. This report will synthesise the main conclusions from the forum’s sessions and formulate concrete recommendations for strengthening student engagement and creating a more innovative and connected campus within each European University Alliance, where every student feels free and empowered to develop their own talents.
Experiences like this are crucial for learning how to collaborate and connect with peers from different nationalities towards a common goal. They also help us grow our autonomy to co-create solutions that contribute to the progress of humanity.
Additionally, having the chance to travel to a different country and explore the city with locals was a truly enriching and inspiring experience — a real win-win-win situation.
EUSAF25 was a unique opportunity to meet student representatives from other alliances informally and to identify evidence-based opportunities to innovate within EUGLOH, always with students’ best interests at heart.
This text is part of the “My EUGLOH story” series, in which members of the EUGLOH community talk about their EUGLOH experience.