Our goal was to welcome our exchange students, who had just arrived in Vienna. We wanted to help them to get to know each other, make new friends, give them an insight in austrian culture and also show them the best places in Vienna as far as it was possible through online events.
Furthermore we gave them some general information about their upcoming time in vienna, about the university, their classes, the city and ESN.
Also one of the most important aims was to to build a connection with the incomings and show them that the ESNUniWien team is there for them whenever they have questions or whenever they need help.
To reach our goals, we planned the welcome week with several events. We tried to include sportif events, online city tours, games, speed friending etc. All our events were organised and conducted according to our corona safety guidelines, which is also why all events took place online only. As we thought that getting to know other each other might be more difficult in times of Corona, but non the less essential, we organised the speed friending event twice.
Our events were realized through Discord, Zoom, Google Meet and Kahoot.
Furthermore, we installed a reward system in order to encourage more incomings to join our events, as we knew that online events are not as well received as offline ones. The reward system consisted of magic words the incomings should write down at the end of each event and extra points they could gain at quizzes or games, which we kept track of. At the end of the welcome week the incoming sent us an email with all the magic words. Each word was worth one point and was summed with the extra points, in order to seceted th winners. The three incomings with the most points were gifted with an ESN-card and some autrian sweets.
Our events during the welcome week were:
Sunday, 28.02.2021: Virtual city tour
Sunday, 28.02.2021: Online Speed friending
Monday, 01.03.2021: Game-Night
Tuesday, 02.03.2021: ESN Presentation
Tuesday, 02.03.2021: Get to know Viennese German! - Learn Austrian Slang
Wednesday, 03.03.2021: Workout
Wednesday, 03.03.2021: Get-together
Thursday, 04.03.2021: Online Yoga
Thursday, 04.03.2021: 2nd online Speed friending
Friday, 05.03.2021: Austrian online Cooking-class
Friday, 05.03.2021: Austrian-Quiz
Saturday, 06.03.2021: Online-International dinner (had to be canceled due to the lack of participants)
Sunday, 07.03.2021: Viennese Coffeehouse Event
Sunday, 07.03.2021: Dancing "Wiener Walzer"
