Recommendations

Dear new HydroEurope Participants,

Here you find some recommendations and good advices from the previous HydroEurope participants. They should help you to manage your project work as a team and enjoy it... Also you can find here some of our replies to an evaluation form about HydroEurope. These give you an impression on what HydroEurope is and what it is not.

• Be clear with the overall goal and the general procedure to follow.
• Plan a half day per week for team work (choose the same for all locations!!!)
• Before starting the project, visit the HydroEurope web site and read almost all the old team reports to get a general overview of the program.
• Use the online-presence to insert ALL your possible online times. Then you can quickly see, when all of you can meet. Later you can delete your additional online times again and only keep the one for which your team decided.
• You should contact your partners at the other locations as soon as possible and manage to distribute the tasks based on everyones specializing.
• Make only one schedule for all weeks, so you do not have to plan again.
• Be transparent with your own motivations.
• Share the responsibilities as soon as possible. And then quickly make a valuable work plan and online presence.
• Good English communication and scientific writing ability.
• Try to get the whole picture instead of simply following the exercises in GIS or MIKE11.
• READ your team web sides and reports and answer the e-mails.
• Enough hydrology knowledge.
• French students, PLEASE practice your English.
• Good in Office, GIS, and MIKE11 application.
• If possible, try to contact students who have taken the course before to get some suggestions.

• Try exchanging within your team not only on the work aspects; give same importance and time to understand the needs, priority and culture of your partners.
• Try to learn a bit French before going to Nice.
• The opportunity is unique, do not hesitate to mix with other people: minority in such context are majority!
• Have a big heart to listen all student.
• Agree on English as communication language in Nice. Otherwise you split the group.
• During the stay, knock to the doors of the rooms in the evening, you will find nice discussion, a party atmosphere and a wonderful opportunity to create contact in an informal and totally free way.
• Spend some time with your team partners at other locations then the working room.
• Be open to all cultures!

• If you have a notebook (laptop), take it to Nice. Especially for reporting and presentation it is nice to work with a familiar key board and you do not block the computers with the software. (Of course there is only a limited number of computers provided)
• Try to get all the GIS and MIKE11 work done before going to Nice. Otherwise you easily work until night time and miss to enjoy.
• Take some time in the beginning to discuss your particular goals for the week and who will do it.

• The collaborative part: we had to work in large teams (10 persons) to reach our goal.
• distribution of tasks
• the language
• dealing with a real life problem
• different functions of the students (workers, coordinator, reporter, web...)
• amount of work
• different background of students
• management of time and work in a group
• It is a web-based collaborative project.

• I really hoped to learn more about the software. But because of lack of time and because we shared the task with many partners, it was not so possible to learn the whole.
• It was worthy for me to attend the classes and work on the project. What I could learn was according with what I expected to learn.
• At the beginning I didn't expect much out of it and I have to admit that the credits were more attractive to me. The real kickoff was after my taking the leadership of our team. I felt the responsibility of getting staff organized and became more and more interested in the project. Generally speaking, I got more than I had expected esp. in the sense of collaboration and communication.
• Less interesting than I was expecting of it.
• The results produced were much more important then I could imagine at the beginning.
• I thought I was going to learn a lot about the academic stuff. But it turned out that the personal experience was much bigger than the academic one.
• In general what I expect is quite similar with what I experienced during the whole project. I was attracted by the 'virtual company', and I got the feeling as a member of the multinational organization. I like working in this way: each member has individual tasks, but they cooperate with each other to finish or achieve the final result.
• About 80% of the students said they achieved their goals.

• It's nice to work with people coming from different culture, background, taste, opinion etc.
• The working with the homepages was not working that well. At the beginning there was nobody who would like to be in charge if this part. At some point I have also tried to work on the homepage improvement. By this I tried to make students from other locations take a look at the page and inform the rest of the group about work they are doing and maybe possible schedule for Netmeetings.
• At the beginning, the team members communicated in Internet very little. But some days later, we found it was very helpful that the Nice students can help us to solve the problems that they faced some days earlier.
• Concerning the team collaboration, it didn't work at all, unfortunately our team colleague didn't answer our mails, didn't work on the project... we only had 1 chat and didn't share any tasks.
• The problems with the English language of some students create a not so sure space for sharing knowledge.
• It is very important to coordinate during all steps particularly at the beginning, otherwise you do the work twice.
• My web-based learning experience was not too good. There was poor or no communication in the beginning when we needed it the most. Also we did not even get answers to our e-mails.
• I learned how to use the internet as a tool to work together. This is something that is necessary when the distance between people is great, but they need each others knowledge or experience.
• I am only a 2nd year student in BA, so I would like to take the responsibility of web-management. But it was not as easy as I consider. Especially at the very beginning it was really a hard job to encourage or contact with other members through internet. But with the development of the project, more and more members concentrated on the team-homepage. So the platform changed to be the room for us to get and change data and information.
• I learned a lot. I'm really grateful to have this opportunity.

• Learning more about problems regarding flood events presented by experts from different countries.
• Opportunity to work with software, which are not available for me or other students when attending the regular courses at the university.
• Learning about web-based collaboration, opportunities which modern technologies offer.
• To work with people from different backgrounds and to experience that communication through internet can replace meetings.
• The friends and the experts.
• The provided technical support and information are excellent and it was clear and easy to find the way through the objective and to identify the work steps.
• The multiculturalism of the members (23 countries were represented).
• When we prepared for the final presentation, everybody was so active and creative. The spirit of "Teamwork" was displayed best at that moment.
• When all the team members were in Nice, all of us devoted ourselves to the project. We share the responsibility, which means we have different tasks, but during the whole week we cooperate with each other very well. It is similar with teamwork in the real company.

• Coordination of a heterogeneous team.
• The idea of working with international students from different environment and different academic level, with good international experts in the area, creates HydroEurope something so special.
• Familiarization with web-based communication tool.
• Contact with different cultures (mentioned many times)
• Improvement in work planning and efficiency.
• I learned how to get oriented, how to get myself understood and how to encourage other people in a team.
• Skills to work together in a team and to give good presentations.
• I learned how to effectively share the responsibility in teamwork, and I got much pleasant memory of this experience.
• Team organization, team communication, team work (mentioned very often)

Average Ranking: 3.8   (1-poor, 5-excellent)

Average Ranking: 4.2   (1-poor, 5-excellent)

Average Ranking: 4      (1-poor, 5-excellent)

Average Ranking: 4.6   (1-not at all, 5-definately)