The purpose of our speedfriending Stammtisch is to connect not only international students with local students but also local students with local students! Due to the Corona restrictions our semester takes place completely online and as a result new students did not have any chance to connect with other ones. On one hand, we wanted to enable an open dialogue between these students and other ones simply looking for new contacts. On the other hand, we as ESN also used this chance to promote student mobility, speak about our Erasmus experiences and to give an impression of our work at ESN in general.
After welcoming the participants we created breakout sessions with two people (if there was an uneven number there was one group with three people) and provided some "Ice Breaker Questions" about general and specific topics. Every ten minutes we reunited in the main session and divided the group randomly again so that everyone had the chance to speak to local students as well as international ones. Due to the success and good feeback we continued with this system for about 3 hours. At the end, those who wanted to chat longer, had the chance to stay in the session and continue to talk about whatever they liked. We used a moment in the main session to give the possibility to exchange phone numbers or other contacting tools (instagram for example).
In advance of our evening we tried to reach as many students as possible threw promoting our event via social media (instagram, facebook etc.). Therefore we asked different sections of the university if they could share our stories and posts which successfully worked out as everyone appreciated our idea of connecting students.
