Goodbye from Rasmus!

OBESSU’s Secretary General Rasmus will leave OBESSU after working here for 2.5 years. He will be replaced by Ela Jakubek, who will introduce herself in an article early next week. But right now, we have a few questions for Rasmus before he leaves us.

What have you enjoyed the most with working for OBESSU?
Working with awesome colleagues (many big thanks to Estel, Giorgio, Anna, Tiia and Paolo!!), working in a field (education) which I am ridiculously interested in, being surrounded by awesome people all the time and being in an environment where the “Let’s change the world!” attitude is always present.

Ok, maybe you can get a bit more specific? Any particular highlight that you want to point out?
This is very difficult to say, but if I need to pick two events that especially stand out I would pick the Training Course for International Officers, both the one in 2013 and the one in 2015. Both were on very interesting topics, both had motivated and engaged participants combined with great prep-teams, and both had excellent evaluations from the participants after the event. And in both of them there was last-minute panic behind the scenes regarding the logistics.
And more generally, I mean not event-specific, one thing I have really enjoyed (and probably spent more time on than what is reasonable) is to prepare the reimbursement presentations for participants at events. A bit silly maybe, but it’s true.

And were there any bad moments?
I have thoroughly enjoyed probably 99 % of the time I have spent in OBESSU. But yeah, I guess there were a couple of moments that were not so fun. Spending one year and seven visits to the bank – yes, I’m not kidding! – to get my name right on the OBESSU bank card was for example not so much fun. And speaking of banks, once in the middle of a stressful period I had to take a train to Amsterdam in order to close down an OBESSU bank account which we opened there in the 1980s and which nobody in OBESSU even knew existed.

Any other crazy memory you will bring with you from OBESSU?
Apart from what was mentioned above, there are a couple of funny, or actually not so funny, situations which are stuck in my mind. One was during the event Right to Representation when I had filled up a shopping cart with cookies and juices for the coffee breaks, and on my way from the supermarket to the venue I was stopped by a very angry woman who accused me of stealing the shopping cart. I tried to explain that I was just going to unload it at the venue and bring it back, but my message didn’t really get through. She picked up the phone, called someone in Lithuanian and told me she was calling the police. I quickly called two OBESSU Board members who ran out and helped me unpacking the shopping cart and taking the cookies/juices inside.

And what are you going to do now?
I will start working for the Erasmus Student Network (ESN). This is a network also working with education, but with a different focus: learning mobility. Just like OBESSU, the network is full of youthful enthusiasm, and just like OBESSU it has a tendency to attract awesome people. I’m really looking forward to it.

Any final advice to OBESSU for the future?
Yes. If OBESSU is looking for someone to chair a statutory meeting at some point, I heard that former Secretary Generals do it very well.