The UniWeliS project consortium organised a symposium “Welcoming universities: Towards high-quality support for international academics in Central-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe” on 21 June in Bratislava, Slovakia. The event was held under the auspices of the Slovak V4 Presidency and organised by the ACA member SAIA, n.o. It was attended by more than 50 participants onsite and more than 50 participants online representing higher education and professionals responsible for international welcome and support services, research project managers, or other professionals and managers dealing with international mobility from the target region and the neighboring countries.

The symposium was opened by Peter Ondreicka, Director of Higher Education Department at the Slovak Ministry of Education, Research, Science and Sports, who presented the Slovak government’s plans for higher education internationalisation, including the international evaluation of national higher education and research institutions conducted under Slovakia’s Recovery and Resilience plan.

Karla Zimanova, Deputy Director of SAIA, gave an overview of the key project outcomes followed by more detailed presentations made by the responsible project partners featuring:

• The report “Attracting and Supporting International PhD Students, Lecturers, and Researchers in Central-Eastern and South-Eastern Europe: Current Status and Recommended Improvements”
• The UniWeliS Explorer App comprising 65 practices for supporting international PhD students, researchers and academics in 14 different categories as well as more than 150 good practice examples collected across Europe
• The Training Manual “Let’s professionalise the services for mobile academics! Comprehensive training for higher education managers and support staff. Including training materials which can be used free of charge by any interested institution to deliver training sessions on any of the six topics: institutional welcome centre: Practical and strategic considerations (module 1), Digital Welcome Center (module 2), Comprehensive approach to support services (module 3), local partnerships (module 4), Intercultural communication: responding to cultural specifics and universals (module 5) and Global profile, marketing, and talent attraction (module 6).
• The online recordings of the six training modules (which will be available on the YouTube channel and Moodle learning management system soon).

The symposium offered a great opportunity to exchange further good practice in building a welcoming environment at higher education institutions in Europe and how to support the administrative staff in their professional development towards internationalisation.

Presentations from the event including the interactive poll results can be consulted here and the videos of different blocks will be available soon.