Get-together

Copy from the mail sent around...

Dear Mentors & Mentees,

A warm welcome to all of you who have (or will soon have) arrived, and a big ‘thank you’ to all of our volunteers! We hope your experience with the mentor program was satisfying, and we’d like to celebrate you participation. Therefore, you are now officially invited to a gathering in (nearly) downtown Copenhagen, with plenty of fine Danish beer, foosball, good opportunities to discover and enjoy CPH nightlife and, naturally, lots of fun.

We will meet on

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 15^TH

at CAFÉ’EN FUNKE (Blegdamsvej 2, Skt. Hans Torv)

at 8:00 PM

The International Office will pay for some beer and snacks, and of course we hope to see all of you there! However, this would require that we book the entire place, so please let us know ASAP whether you are coming or not by responding to the
link below.

http://www.meetomatic.com/respond.php?id=LBIJ9F

Just fill in your name and e-mail address (put it in the comment
section) and mark the check box under the date. It takes just two minutes, and we need to have your response by February 5^th.

We’re looking forward to kick your ass in foosball :)

Rasmus & Frauke

Mentor Program Coordinators

Exchange student FAQ

The following PDF file might be very helpful for all exchange students or mentors trying to help-out:

http://www.ruc.dk/ruc_en/studying/IntOffice/intsec/faq/

The following questions are answered:

How do I get a Residence Permit?
How do I register in Denmark?
What about Health Insurance?
Other kinds of insurance needed?
How do I get a work permit?
How do I get a Student Card?
How do I get a Library Card?
How do I get an E-Mail account?
How much money do I need per month?
How do I get a Danish bank account?
Where can I get more information?

RUC Foundation Course

Check out this email, just in case you missed it in your inbox:

Dear all mentor program participants - RUC students as well as exchange students

The mentor-matching process is over and all arriving exchange students has been partnered with a RUC mentor. We hope that you have already established contact with each other; some might already have met.

From here on you will receive just two more mails from the mentor-program.

This is the first one, where we want to first all thank you for participating in the program and second inform you about the Foundation Course organized by RUC's Languages and Intercultural Communication Services. The whole course stretched over several days and the exchange students are expected to participate all days. (You will probably have received information about this course already.)
The course starts off with a 9.15 breakfast on Wednesday the 16 of January, and here mentors of exchange students - that would be all your RUC students, who volunteered for this program - are invited to participate .
We strongly encourage all you mentors to participate in the event. It's a great way to meet some of your mentee's coming classmates as well as get more general information about the international initiatives here at RUC. Some of you are mentoring an exchange student who will be arriving after the 16th of January. In that case you are still very much welcome to participate in the Foundation Course breakfast.
The program for the Foundation Course in it's entire form is attached.

The second email, which you will receive from us, will be about an upcoming mentor-program event. This event is expected to take places either late January or sometime in February, but it is not yet settled. More information will follow.

That's it. Once again: thank you for participating. Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at mentor@ruc.dk

All the best,
Frauke and Rasmus
Mentor-program coordinators

A mentor-movie ... and Happy New Year

Happy new year to all.

If you're sitting at home during the vacation and want to know some more about what it's like to be an exchange student we suggest you watch a French movie called L'Auberge Espagnole or The Spanish Apartment in English. Check out the trailer above.

Enjoy!
(Sorry, couldn't find a trailer with English subtitles, but should be understandable).

Been there, done that - personal mentor experiences

The best source of information about the mentor program must be somebody who has previously participate in the program. Abby from The Philippines was an exchange student at Roskilde University in the Spring semester 2007. And luckily for us, she blogged about it. Take a look at the following posts:

• Arriving in DK
• Meeting mentor in the airport
• First post about Trekroner (Where RU is located)
• About cooking
• Home improvements
• About the introduction lunch at RU
• About group work at RU

This was just some suggested reading. Basically you can just take a look at all Abby's posts archives from January 2007 and February 2007 for mentor related stuff, and continue browsing through the archives up until August 2007 for a lot of Roskilde University related stuff.

Thank you to Abby for allowing us to reference her blog!

Posters are up - and online

Welcome back, our mentor-program interested friend

If you are at RUC these days you will (hopefully) have noticed that the mentor posters have been put up building one (around the canteen, big auditorium and small auditorium).

If you think the posters look similar to the ones used last semester, you are quite right. There is nothing wrong in re-using a good idea, so that is what we did.

If you are not physically present at RUC and therefore not able to stroll trough the canteen and enjoy the beautiful posters(!) - which is obviously the case for all of you, who are coming exchange students - do not fear: on the mentor.ruc.dk Information page we have PDF version of both the Danish and English poster versions. Click here to get to the Information page.

Enjoy!

PS: don't forget sign up: www.mentor.ruc.dk

Start up: Roskilde University Mentor Program - Spring semester 2007

Hello there and welcome to the RUC Mentor Program blog!

First some essentials. We assume that since you are here, visiting this blog and reading what we have written, you are either:

• An exchange student, on his way to begin a semester at Roskilde University;
• a current RUC-student interested in volunteering as a mentor and welcome one such above mentioned exchange student, and in return get to practice language, meet new people - in general be international;
• a Copenhagen University student spying on one of the many cool initiatives we have here at RUC!
• or you a simply very lost!

Regardless of who you are, we welcome you! (If you really are lost, by all means stay and read what we have to write, but you might want to go to the Mentor Program Website and check up on what this program is all about.)


Another semester is about to start at RUC, which means that we here at the Mentor Coordination will be starting up the mentor program once again. We are continuing on a good basis: last semester about 80 exchange students signed up for the program and they were welcomed by about just as many volunteering RUC-students. But there is room for improvement. Reading through the suggestions we received after last semester it becomes clear that more information is highly desired. Here are some of the new initiatives that we hope will help meet this demand:

• This blog: we hope it will make it possible to keep you updated on all mentor related matters throughout the program.
  
• Comments on blog-post: this is the web 2.0, no longer based on inactive, static content. Whenever you have a question, write a comment here or send us an email at mentor@ruc.dk and ask us to post it. Often others can benefit from the question you ask, so don't hold back. (But please be nice when commenting: we allow anonymous comments, but don't misuse it.)
  
• More information on the http://mentor.ruc.dk : In cooperation with International Office, we hope to provide links to much of the information that will help you as (mentor for a) new exchange student.

Of course the most important is you: we need you to sign up and volunteer, and help an exchange student to a good start here at RUC. And if you are an exchange student, then sign up as a mentee (our term for an exchange student who signed up with the mentor program), so the the mentors have somebody to welcome.
With out all of you, it's really just the two of us writing blog-posts and hanging posters .. in short, we need you!

Head over to http://mentor.ruc.dk and sign-up, and then return here soon for many interesting and relevant updates.

All the best,
Frauke and Rasmus