Leonardo Da Vinci Internship – The Results

It seems that it was one month ago that i was preparing my luggage to go on another journey abroad. Once again Kaunas in Lithuania was my destination but this time for my Leonardo da Vinci Internship. But the reality is that six months passed and it is now time to make the maths and check the results.

In terms of work the basic output of the whole period could be summarized in the following topics:

1. Seminar / Conference
2. Book Planning
3. Institutional Website Recommendations
4. Mobility Management System

Le’ts go a little bit more in detail to each one of these parts.

1 – Seminar / Conference

• Name: “In Love With ERASMUS”
• Description: This was a seminar for all the faculty students and was intended to:
  • inform students about what options they have (exchange programmes, destinations – partner insitutions, etc.)
  • motivate students and show them the benefits of mobility programmes for both their career and life as a whole
• Specifications
  • 115+ Attendees
  • 77 Emails Collected (≈75% of students)
  • 19 Speakers
  • More details here: In Love with Erasmus Information Seminar

2 – Book Planning

Planned a guide for outgoing students to answer the most frequently asked questions and some programme specifications. The end result was a mindmap with a detailed structure.

3 – Main Website Recommendations

I have created and delivered an mindmap with more than 50 critical recommendations for the institutional website of the host institution KAUKO.lt. The recommendations cover many topics and areas of online development and marketing – they go from tips for improving the loading times of the website to advices for having social media interaction.

4 – Mobility Management System

• Name: Mobility Management System
• Description: Online platform that works both as a CMS as well as an application management platform. It allows administrators to manage articles, applications, users, reports, partner institutions, faculties, coordinators, mobility programmes and much more. It simplifies and speeds up the whole process of application, tracking and the communication between all parties involved.
  Despite being a bold and risky move the creation of this platform from scratch proved to be the best way to go. The development of this applications involved a lot of work – planning (business modelling, requirementes, analysis and desing), coding, upgrading and constant communication between me (the developper) and the host institution staff (the “client”).
• Specifications:
  • 1 Developer
  • 25’000+ Code Lines
  • Technologies: Zend Framework, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, CSS, HTML, JavaScript (jQuery), integration with CKEditor, XML, more.

I was also invited to be give a lecture about “How to give an effective presentation” and  that was an experience that I enjoyed a lot - thank you very much for the opportunity Ms. Ieva Brazauskaite-Zubaviciene.

As a whole I consider that my internship was a success and so does the host institution (Kaunas University of Applied Sciences) – [Link - Soon]certificate. This experience was a real challenge because many of the tasks previously mentioned were going on simultaneously. It was not always an easy but with dedication, work and organization I successfully managed to work on all of them reached the expected goals.
The “Leonardo Da Vinci” programme is a great opportunity for recent graduates who want become and think global – this experience will allow them to improve their skills in their area of studies, get in touch with a foreign culture and way of work, enlarge their contact network and have an international work experience which is valued by many employers. With a global work market these are definitely some experiences and skills that you should value. I feel extremely lucky to have had the chance to participate in this programme and I really recommend everyone that is able to do it to apply for it. This, just like Erasmus, is one of those experiences that will certainly change (dare i say “improve/better”) your life.

What could have been better? Well, in all honesty, the only thing that I would change would be the duration of the stay that I would upgrade from six to nine or twelve months. The main reason is that I think that it would be great to continue developing and improving the “mobility management system” that was created for i strongly believe that it is a “diamond in the ruff ” that with some more work could become an extremely useful platform for many institutions to use. But more on that later…

I would now like to thank everybody that I had the chance to meet during my stay in beautiful Lithuania during these incredible six months – “Aciu Labai” (thank you very much in Lithuanian). And, if you ever come to Portugal don’t forget to let me know about your stay!
Last but not least i would like to thank all the staff of the Department Of International Relations of KAUKO as well as the staff of the GPI of the Instituto Politécnico do Porto. Thank you very much for this opportunity and for all the support you gave me along the way.

Thank you for reading this article. Please feel free to leave a comment or contact me.