Grace Etienne found INGENIUM by accident. It was spring 2025, and the University of Skövde had posted a short notice on its website: a European alliance of universities was looking for students to join a newly created Sustainability Board. The wording was vague (something about collaboration, student voice), but Grace, a Biomedicine student in her penultimate year with an interest in environmental questions, liked the sound of it.

“I understood from the ad that INGENIUM was really an alliance with other students from different parts of Europe,” she says, “and I wanted the opportunity to meet with other students. I also have a passion for sustainability, so I thought: I’ll send an application.”

She sent it. She was accepted. Less than a year later, she was elected president of the INGENIUM Student Board (ISB), the body that now holds a seat and a vote at the alliance’s top governance tables.

The INGENIUM Student’s Board President, Grace Etienne.

What the Student Board actually is

INGENIUM groups ten European universities, from Sweden to Romania, from Spain to Bulgaria, under the umbrella of a European Universities alliance funded by Erasmus+. Like every alliance of its kind, it has accumulated the usual governance apparatus: a Steering Committee, an Alliance Council, work packages on education, research, sustainability and communication. The Student Board sits inside that architecture as the official voice of the students.

Plenty of alliances have student representation on paper. What sets the ISB apart is how seriously INGENIUM has chosen to take it. Board members vote at the Steering Committee and the Alliance Council. They are asked to review policy documents before they are signed off (the student manual for the pathway Programmes, for instance, was circulated to them for feedback ahead of publication), and they are expected to run their own initiatives, not simply endorse other people’s.

Grace is firm on this. “One big plus about INGENIUM is that student participation is not just symbolic, but it’s actually something that is concrete,” she says. “I receive messages from the Director; they keep me updated on decisions that are taking place. And recently I was informed about a student manual for the Pathway Programmes, where they actually reached out requesting revision and feedback from Board members. That shows that INGENIUM really values the perspectives and opinions of students.”

From an online ad to the presidency

Nothing about Grace’s route to the top job was planned. After joining the Sustainability Board, she heard about the INGENIUM’s Student Partnership Call for Joint Projects, applied, got in, and flew to Romania to meet her teammates in person. That trip, she says, was the turning point.

“It was there, meeting the students in person, that I realised I really did want to stay involved in INGENIUM. You develop a kind of relationship with the other students that becomes a friendship. You’re working together on something, and it turns into more than just an extracurricular.”

Back in Sweden, Grace was already acting as an informal INGENIUM ambassador at Skövde, one of the students who had taken part in an alliance activity and could talk about it from experience. When the positions for the new term of the Student Board opened, she went straight for it.

“I wanted to stay involved in INGENIUM,” she says, “and I thought the Board was a great way to do so.” She was elected in November 2025.

Iași, January 2026: the Board finds itself

If the Student Board’s new term has a birthday, it is four days in Iași last January. Hosted by the Gheorghe Asachi Technical University (TUIASI), the summit pulled board members together in the same room for the first time, and it was there that the ISB actually took shape.

The meeting ran from 23 to 26 January, piggy-backing on a wider INGENIUM week, the 10 Days of INGENIUM, that included the Senior Winter School (“Science Meets Industry”), the work package leaders, the Alliance Council and the Steering Committee. The students’ own agenda was separate, and its goal to turn a group of strangers into a team.

A moment from the INGENIUM Student Board meeting in Iași, Romania, in January 2026.”

What Grace flags first about this summit is not a policy or a project but a short set of ground rules the Board drafted together, titled “How We Work Together”. It says, in effect, that everyone speaks, all voices weigh the same, and respect is non-negotiable.

“Within the Board, students are from ten different universities across Europe, and our English levels are varied, of course. But we have this approach where everyone feels welcome and open to want to share their ideas because we work together on a shared goal. I think anybody who is interested in student representation should not be afraid of language barriers. Everyone is working together on the same goal.”

That is not a side issue. For students from non-English-speaking backgrounds, the unspoken assumption that international spaces belong to those who are already confident, already articulate, already well-travelled is one of the main reasons they never apply in the first place.

Getting students to notice

Ask Grace what she wants to achieve before her mandate ends in June 2026, and the answer comes quickly. Visibility. Get the word out. Make sure students across the ten universities actually know INGENIUM exists.

On the face of it, that sounds modest. It is not. The gap between what these alliances are building and how little the average enrolled student knows about it is arguably the single biggest problem facing the European Universities initiative. Even at founding INGENIUM institutions, a lot of students have not yet heard the name.

“At the very beginning, for almost every student who hasn’t heard of INGENIUM before, it’s a bit of a mystery. The universities do try to promote it through ads on their websites and printed posters, but the idea of INGENIUM is still missed by a lot of students. What we’ve noticed is that when students who have already taken part in INGENIUM activities are the ones telling others about it, there’s far more engagement. Peer-to-peer communication is more interactive, students hear about the experience from someone who’s actually lived it, and that’s what motivates them to get involved.”

The finding, peers outperform posters, is not new, but it has shaped how the Board operates. Rather than simply relaying official communications, members run their own local campaigns at their home universities, in whatever form fits the place.

By March 2026 the approach was showing. A board member in Sofia had staged a promotional event on campus. Skövde was doing the same. In Oviedo, the local ISB president had assembled a team of volunteers and was about to launch a dedicated awareness drive. The idea was conceived collectively by the Board and handed to members to execute locally. The machine was moving.

A moment from the INGENIUM Student Board meeting in Iași, Romania, in January 2026.

What joining involves

For a student at any INGENIUM university who has already done one alliance activity and wants to take it further, getting onto the Board is deliberately uncomplicated. There is no competitive application process. The entry point is the local INGENIUM coordinator.

“If a student is interested in going a bit further into student representation, they should reach out to their coordinator and say so, and the coordinator will point them in the right direction. It really shouldn’t be difficult. All students are welcome to join the Board if they have the drive to shape INGENIUM in a way that benefits students across the Alliance.”

The time commitment, Grace says, is around three to four hours a week, with a board meeting every fortnight. It should not, she insists, get in the way of studies. But it is not a token role either: it asks for consistency, a willingness to speak for your peers, and a certain affinity with working in a multilingual, multicultural environment.

The payoff is harder to pin down. Grace describes it less in CV terms than in personal ones: real friendships across ten countries, a sense of contributing to something bigger than a single campus, and a broadening of perspective that, in her telling, is the thing INGENIUM is really good for.

What INGENIUM leaves behind

Asked what she sees change in students before and after an INGENIUM activity, Grace reaches for a single word.

“Students become more open-minded. Whatever activity you take part in (the 10 Days of INGENIUM, a partnership project, something else) you always get the chance to work with students from other universities. That broadens your cultural perspective, and your language skills develop one way or another. You grow as a person, instead of staying inside the bubble of your own campus.”

Grace Etienne’s mandate ends in June 2026, the same month she finishes her undergraduate degree. Whatever she does next, the Student Board she leaves behind will carry her fingerprints: the ground rules drafted in Iași, the insistence that student participation be concrete rather than symbolic, the quiet conviction that ten universities can, in fact, act like one.

INGENIUM is becoming this week the first international university alliance to undergo a prestigious external review. The University of Oviedo, acting as coordinator, is hosting from 6 to 10 April the visit of the evaluation team from the Institutional Evaluation Programme (IEP) of the European University Association (EUA), together with representatives of the other nine partner institutions. Around 60 people in total, including rectors, academic staff, technical and management personnel, and students, are taking part in a programme that features sessions open to the wider community.

The IEP is the most prestigious peer review scheme in Europe for higher education institutions, and has been running for more than 30 years. Over that time, it has carried out more than 460 evaluations across over 50 countries. It has recently broadened its scope to offer, for the first time, reviews tailored to European university alliances, and INGENIUM is the first to take part in this new framework.

Unlike accreditations or rankings, the outcome of the IEP is not binding. Its purpose is constructive, aimed at improving governance and internal processes. The evaluation team, made up of experts in European higher education and university policy, is examining the alliance in depth to help INGENIUM strengthen its strategic leadership, its capacity to manage change and its internal quality culture.

The review is structured around five key questions that cut across every area of activity: what vision the alliance pursues, how it intends to achieve its goals, how it monitors progress, how it safeguards the quality of its educational, research and service offerings and, particularly importantly, how it plans to complete the transition from project-based management towards genuine integration and sustained cooperation.

An extensive programme

The visit runs over five days, with a packed schedule of meetings between the evaluation team and representatives of the ten INGENIUM universities, alongside a series of complementary activities.

Throughout the week, the evaluators are meeting with the Rector of the University of Oviedo, Ignacio Villaverde, with rectors and presidents from the other partner universities and with the coordinators of the INGENIUM Technical Secretariat. They are also holding interviews with academic staff responsible for the joint educational offer and for research and innovation activities, with those in charge of quality assurance, with students involved in alliance activities, with external stakeholders and with staff working on student services, mobility and internationalisation.

On the final day, Friday 10 April, the evaluation team will present a preliminary oral report setting out its conclusions and recommendations, first to the Rector and then to the wider alliance community in the closing working session.

As part of the programme, a seminar open to the whole university community will be held on Thursday 9 April at 16:45 in the Aula Magna of the Historical Building. It has been designed to encourage exchange among the members of the INGENIUM community gathered in Oviedo, and to share the main activities and achievements of the alliance with a broader audience. The seminar is structured around three round tables and a closing presentation.

A turning point

The visit comes at a pivotal moment for INGENIUM. In March, the alliance submitted its bid to the new European Universities funding call for the 2027-2028 period, along with a project proposal for the European Degree Label. At the same time, preparations are being finalised for the rollout of its joint educational offer for the coming academic year, which will feature new microcredentials, the launch of the Pathway programmes and the first joint undergraduate and postgraduate degrees.

On 4 March 2026, INGENIUM submitted its ‘Next INGENIUM’ proposal under the European Universities call, a formal bid to extend Erasmus+ funding through to December 2028 and to propel our ten partner universities from a pilot phase of transnational cooperation into something altogether more ambitious: a genuinely integrated European University.

The person leading that effort, Juan Rayón, only assumed the role of Director of the INGENIUM Alliance on 29 January, appointed at the last meeting of the Alliance Council in Iași, Romania. Mr Rayón brings to the role a background that spans European institutions, student advocacy, and legal expertise.

INGENIUM Alliance Council meeting in Iasi, in January 2026, where Juan Rayón was appointed new Director of the Alliance

Before his appointment as Strategic Manager of INGENIUM in January 2024, the post he held immediately before becoming Director, he served as a Policy Assistant in the Higher Education Unit of the Directorate-General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture at the European Commission. Prior to that, he spent two years as President of the Erasmus Student Network. He holds a degree in Law from the University of Oviedo and a Master’s degree in European and International Studies and Law from the University of Granada.

The Next INGENIUM proposal is, by design, a qualitative leap. Where the first phase of the alliance (2023–2026) built shared governance structures, initiated joint educational frameworks, established doctoral ecosystems, and created common policies on sustainability, inclusion, multilingualism, and wellbeing, Next INGENIUM sets out to embed all of that into the ordinary institutional rhythms of its ten partner institutions.

The proposal is explicit about its long-term ambition: by 2035, INGENIUM aims to function as a single European University operating across ten sites, with harmonised academic processes, scaled mobility, joint qualifications addressing pan-European skills gaps, and a permanent legal entity ensuring continuity beyond any individual funding cycle.