Student exchange programme in Croatia - The experience of our scholarship recipient Milica Damjanović

Central European Exchange Programme for University Studies CEEPUS enables students and professors from various higher education institutions accross Serbia to participate in academic mobility activities. The CEEPUS program has been carried out successfully for almost thirty years and up until now, it includes as many as fifteen member states of Central Europe: Austria, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Hungary, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and the Czech Republic. Although the program also enables teachers to apply for mobility activites, as already indicated, it pays more attention to students’ mobility, thus enabling them to attend courses at academic institutions abroad, take exams, improve their domain-specific and soft skills, conduct scientific research, get in touch with foreign students and much more!

A few times a year, several foreign higher education institutions make mobility calls when students can apply for a program that is related to the field that they are studying in their home country. This is an open call, so all students across Serbia have the opportunity to apply by filling out a form in which they express their interests and educational goals that they would like to achieve within the program. Hereby candidates can also declare whether they would like to participate in full semestral activities, such as attending courses and passing exams to achieve ESPB points, or whether they would want to participate in shorter academic exchanges lasting up to three months, which are generally realized to conduct research and/or work on a master's or doctoral thesis. The application process also involves a submission of a short autobiography and motivation letter. If the applicants pass the selection, the country in which the mobility program is being carried out provides a complete student scholarship for the specified duration of mobility. The scholarship paid a sum of money for a stay abroad, as well as accommodation in a student dormitory, meals in a student canteen and health insurance.
I had the opportunity to participate in this mobility program. I spent a month studying in Croatia at the Department of Psychology at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Rijeka. After I received the information that I had been accepted to the program, with my mentor from my home faculty, dr Kaja Damnjanović, I contacted professor dr Igor Bajšanski who happens to be interested in the same research field as the two of us. During my month-long stay, the three of us have conducted research in the field of complex cognition called "Confident and with good reason?" Relationship between judgment of task-solving ability and final judgment of confidence on syllogistic reasoning tasks". We presented that research the following year at the "Empirical Research in Psychology" conference, where we won the award for the best poster presentation. 

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In addition to the fact that this exchange enabled me to improve professionally and conduct scientific research work in the field that I am interested in, for which I was later awarded, it first of all brought me a handful of friends from Croatia, with whom I still stay in touch to this day and who I look forward seeing to. I highly encourage all interested students to read more about open-call applications regarding CEEPUS network mobility for 2022/2023. year via the following link https://www.ceepus.info/default.aspx#nbb, and I also encourage them to apply for one of the programs via the following page 
​https://www.ceepus.info/default.aspx#nbb. Good luck to everyone!

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