Over the past four years, students have been the main participants in INGENIUM. The Student Conference invites them to help decide what INGENIUM should offer them and how they should have a say in it.

A Roadmap written by students

The Conference will take place during the week of the INGENIUM Final Conference, when the Steering Committee and the Academic Assembly also meet in Oviedo. Over five days, the delegations will write the INGENIUM Student Participation Roadmap 2027-2028, present it to the Academic Assembly on 24 November and carry it into the Final Conference the following day. Every participant will sign it as a co-author.

The work will be organised in three streams. The first will look at the INGENIUM offer for students, asking whether the Student Calendar is easy to follow, which opportunities matter most and what is still missing. The second will deal with student representation, comparing how students are represented at each partner university and how local student boards could work alongside the INGENIUM Student Board. The third will focus on communication, on how INGENIUM reaches students in each country.

Each stream will draft one chapter, and the Roadmap will close with the commitments students are ready to make and a short list of requests to the Academic Assembly, each with an owner and a date.

The student voice in the Alliance

An alliance of ten universities needs students who can speak for their peers in the places where decisions are taken. The Conference will give the INGENIUM Student Board and the student representatives of each university a document drafted with fifty peers from across Europe, and the chance to defend it in person before the Academic Assembly.

Delegations

Each university will be able to send up to five students, bringing together those who already know INGENIUM well, those involved in student representation and those who have never taken part in any of its activities.

The working language will be English, and travel and accommodation will be covered by the INGENIUM office of each university.

Application

Applications are submitted through a single online form, and the INGENIUM office of each university will select its delegation and inform every applicant by 23 October. The call, with the full programme and the contact of each office, can be downloaded below.

At the centre of FutureProof is a sustainability-themed escape room that the student team has been developing over the past year. The meeting in Crete gave members of the international FutureProof team the opportunity to work together in person, further develop the prototype and gather feedback that will help shape the project as it continues to evolve.

Among the students taking part were Alma Snäckerström, a third-year student in the Bachelor’s Programme in Ecology and Environmental Science at the University of Skövde, and Ivona Fekova, a second-year Biomedicine student.

For Alma, meeting the other members of the team in person was an important part of moving the collaboration forward.

“It was an amazing experience to visit Crete, learn about the history, nature and culture of the island. It was also so much fun to meet all the other students and finally getting to collaborate in real life on our project called FutureProof.”

Ivona Fekova HiS, Anna Vienna UOC and Alma Snäckerström HiS

Testing and developing FutureProof together

A major focus of the meeting was the continued development of the FutureProof escape room. Members of the project team worked together on improving and building the prototype, while students from the University of Crete tested different puzzles and provided feedback that could be used to refine the experience.

The programme also gave participants the opportunity to explore other approaches to sustainability education and action. Students tested a board game focused on biodiversity and pollinators, attended keynote lectures on climate action and biodiversity, and exchanged examples of sustainability initiatives already taking place on their campuses.

They also took part in a practical biodiversity activity, collecting natural materials and building a bug hotel on the University of Crete campus. Alongside the activity, the students developed a guide that can help others create similar habitats.

Together, these activities gave the FutureProof team new ideas and perspectives to take into the continued development of the project.

Learning across campuses

One of the strengths of the Student Partnerships approach is that students from different universities can bring their own experiences into a shared project and learn from initiatives already working elsewhere.

For Ivona, some of the most valuable ideas came from seeing the practical actions students are already taking on their campuses.

“What stood out to me most were the small actions students take that add up to a bigger impact. I learned about initiatives from other campuses, including bike and food sharing programs, pollinator-friendly meadows, and educational film evenings.”

These exchanges also open opportunities for successful ideas to travel between universities. Practices developed on one campus can inspire new initiatives elsewhere, while projects such as FutureProof can benefit from the different perspectives, expertise and experiences students bring from across the alliance.

“It was really exciting to work together with people from different countries and reflect and learn about the sustainability practices in their home universities,” says Ivona.

Ivona fekova HIS, Adam O’neill MTU, Anotida Marumbeyi HKA, Maria Lucia Monaco UNICH, Anna Vienna UOC, Sonia Maria Rodríguez Huerta UNIOVI, Alma Snäckerström HIS, Raluca-Maria Tâbuleac TUIASI

Student Partnerships in practice

FutureProof is one of the projects developed through INGENIUM’s Student Partnerships initiative, which gives students an active role in creating and implementing ideas together across the alliance.

The meeting in Crete shows what that approach can look like in practice: members of a student team from different INGENIUM universities coming together to develop a shared project, test their ideas, exchange knowledge between campuses and turn those ideas into activities that can be used by wider university communities.

As FutureProof continues its implementation, the ideas and feedback gathered in Crete will contribute to the next stage of the project and to the team’s work on sustainability learning across INGENIUM.

Since 2021, an infrastructure project asking for European money has had to document what climate change will do to it across its service life and what the design does in response. That documentation is known as climate proofing. The obligation ends up with whoever drafts the project, and it asks for work that most civil engineering and urban planning degrees never taught.

Underneath the terminology, the subject is the street outside. A street drains the rainfall it was sized for, and the storms now arriving were not in the record when the drainage was laid. The asphalt softens in heatwaves it was not specified against, and the trees planted to shade it come under drought. Someone must work out what to change, how much of the change the budget will carry and how to put the evidence in front of a European fund that will ask for it. This four-week course aims to prepare its students to take on this challenge.

Six units, four weeks, one street

The teaching object is a street. Participants start from the regulatory requirements and the concepts of climate risk and vulnerability assessment, then apply that framework to a real stretch of urban road, turning descriptive risk into numbers that can be compared between design options.

Once the risk is measured, the course moves to what can be done about it. One block goes to Sustainable Urban Drainage Systems and to how green infrastructure absorbs runoff, increases infiltration and relieves conventional drainage when it is written into street design. The course then turns to engineering and planning strategies drawn from German research on adapting city road networks to flash floods, heatwaves and drought.

The course closes with a modelling workshop where participants collect traffic data, calibrate a microsimulation of a street or an intersection and test alternative designs against the operational, safety and environmental results each one produces. By the end, a participant can say what a bioswale or a new lane layout does to the delay, the emissions and the crash risk at a junction, with the model output to show for it.

How three universities put one course together

The two people who designed the course come at climate proofing from opposite ends. One evaluates the climate and Do No Significant Harm studies that engineers submit with their funding applications, so the weak ones cross his desk. The other has been producing the methods those studies rely on, in research on urban streets. Before drafting their proposal they went looking for training that already covered this ground across the alliance and could not find it.

Teaching is shared between the Gheorghe Asachi Technical University of Iași (Romania) and Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences (Germany), with the University of Oviedo coordinating the micro-credential. Everything runs on the INGENIUM e-learning platform, with a live session each week and individual and group work in between, supported by online tutoring and recorded lectures for a cohort that will arrive with uneven backgrounds.

Assessment has two graded pieces. One part is a practical project, submitted as a portfolio that carries the mapping and the technical work alongside a summary written for a manager or a policy reader. The other is the presentation of that project in the closing session on 30 October, with questions about the methods used and where they stop working. Both pieces are graded and supervised online.

Students and professionals in the same cohort

Thirty places are open to students in the last years of a bachelor’s degree, to master’s students, doctoral candidates and professionals outside the alliance. The profile covers civil and environmental engineers, urban planners, transport specialists and staff in public authorities handling EU-funded investments. There is no formal academic prerequisite, although the level of the content assumes some background in a related field. Teaching is in English.

Enrolment closes on 19 September 2026 and runs through the registration form below. The fee is 35 euros, with payment instructions sent once a place is confirmed and no refund except when the course is cancelled or the university cannot deliver the course. Questions go to marius.telisca@academic.tuiasi.ro.