Carmen Mazijn. Samen voor een intelligent beleid.

The trigger for Carmen was her Erasmus exchange in Granada. "Suddenly you are on your own in another country, and you have to do it all by yourself. You start looking for peers, people from all parts of the world with diverse viewpoints. Back in Brussels, I didn't want to lose this inspiring melting pot of perspectives. And actually, that's not so hard. The streets in Brussels are full of these perspectives."   

At ESN, Erasmus Student Network, she began to help international VUB students settle on campus. She noticed how small changes in VUB policy could mean a lot to them. So she stood as a candidate for the student council.    

There she started thinking about the way groups could be facilitated to achieve their goals, and how participatory leadership could improve policies. Nowadays, she coaches groups, and moderates workshops.   

Collaboration between human and machine   

Carmen's student engagement ran parallel with her studies in Mathematics and Political Science. The combination of both disciplines lead towards her interdisciplinary PhD. She researches a peculiar type of collaboration, the one between man and machine.   

"Machine learning can help solve many problems, but we have to be aware that machines are made by humans. They will never be 100% correct and may also contain human biases. Machines and algorithms can support people to take better decisions, but in the end, people are still the ones who have to take them. I am therefore investigating the fairness of Artificial Intelligence systems. To what extent they can be called fair, and fulfil their role in an ethical way."   

"EUTOPIA gives me a European network for this. I hope to meet people working on the same topics, so I can collaborate with them."   

Co-creating in Europe: the new Erasmus experience   

EUTOPIA, the word is out. Six European universities, including VUB, are working together in an alliance to strengthen education and research, shaping the university of the future. Until recently, Carmen represented the PhD students in the EUTOPIA Student Council. She sees EUTOPIA as an opportunity to reinvent exchanges, in terms of teaching and research.   

"The Erasmus+ programme has been around for 30 years and has allowed many students to spend a semester abroad. To study in another country. It is a fantastic experience that every student should be able to enjoy. It changes your self-perspective, and your views on the world. But after such an exchange, you just go home to complete your education. It is a very individual trajectory, a moment in time. With EUTOPIA we are thinking about how the six universities can offer education together. As a kind of permanent international experience, across the whole learning pathway, in the so-called Connected Learning Communities."    

As a PhD student, Carmen wants to actively contribute to this innovation. EUTOPIA brings together all of her passions and commitments: internationalisation, policy participation and innovative people-to-people collaboration.    

"For me, EUTOPIA is the ambition to create, co-create, future-proof higher education and university research together with students, researchers, staff and our communities."  

"For VUB, EUTOPIA is a door to Europe. Our students and researchers can easily gain experience and knowledge through this door. And our partner universities come to Brussels where we can show them our wonderful multicultural context. All of these perspectives make the ambitions more valuable."   

Partnership as a sustainable knowledge logic   

"Modern universities can’t do without collaboration. Educating students and creating new knowledge cannot be realised in a vacuum. Working on your own in a lab or writing a manuscript has less have value if you can’t discuss it with colleagues and share it with the world and your communities. That is why international and interdisciplinary partnerships are so essential."   

"EUTOPIA includes many projects and opportunities. We are made up of like-minded universities, but every partner has its own individuality. It is not possible to find exactly the same universities in all corners of Europe. So everyone has entered EUTOPIA with a different framework and sees different advantages in it. That is a strength of partnership."    

Connecting different worlds 

"EUTOPIA is also interesting because there is a big focus on working with non-academic partners. Preferably we work together on projects that are relevant to our communities within a local context. Those projects always collaborate with local partners. That is what weKONEKT.brussels does on a Brussels level. We are extending that to the context of EUTOPIA. Our Brussels partners get connections in those five other cities and we can extend our networks to other, foreign local partners in return."   

Connecting knowledge and engagement   

When Carmen talks about EUTOPIA, you can feel the passion through the computer screen.    

People always come first for her, beyond any border of language or culture. She already wants to embrace the future, sooner rather than later. Along the way she developed an interest in policy. Partnership is a keyword in this. Partnership between people in an international context, but also between human and machine.