Features

Open for the holidays

The academic year is over but Catalonia’s universities offer the chance to improve your knowledge in the summer

Cata­lan uni­ver­si­ties don’t close in sum­mer. Rather they offer courses and ac­tiv­i­ties for their own stu­dents and peo­ple with no di­rect links to the world of higher ed­u­ca­tion, but who want to take ad­van­tage of this pe­riod to broaden their knowl­edge.

An ex­am­ple is Els Juli­ols pro­gramme at Barcelona Uni­ver­sity, which last year at­tracted 1,700 peo­ple and which of­fers around a hun­dred dif­fer­ent courses in areas from art, music and cin­ema to tech­nol­ogy, eco­nom­ics, phi­los­o­phy and bi­ol­ogy. “Among those who sign up are young peo­ple who still haven’t started uni­ver­sity but who wanted to have their first ex­pe­ri­ence of it, peo­ple who are al­ready un­der­grad­u­ates and also peo­ple over 50 who are pro­fes­sion­ally es­tab­lished but who want to go back to the class­room out of a de­sire to learn new things,” says one head of the pro­gramme that has ex­pe­ri­enced an 11% in­crease in the num­ber of peo­ple signed up in just two years. The idea is cre­ate a “micro-uni­ver­sity”, a mir­ror image of how classes work dur­ing the nor­mal aca­d­e­mic year. In the 22 years that Els Juli­ols have been work­ing, the pro­gramme’s or­gan­is­ers have found that the courses re­lated to art, pol­i­tics and phi­los­o­phy are the most pop­u­lar. Apart from the usual sub­jects, the 2018 edi­tion will also offer courses in four areas: the Sum­mer Uni­ver­sity of the Woman (now in its 11th edi­tion), En­tre­pre­neur­ship, May ‘68, and The State: rev­o­lu­tion and re­pres­sion.

The world at home

At Barcelona’s Au­tonomous Uni­ver­sity (UAB), the star sum­mer pro­gramme is the Barcelona Sum­mer School, which is aimed at stu­dents who want an in­ter­na­tional ex­pe­ri­ence with­out going abroad. “It of­fers sub­jects in all areas, with a total of six ECTS cred­its with aca­d­e­mic recog­ni­tion. The courses are com­pletely in Eng­lish and take place in two three-week pe­ri­ods from the end of June until the be­gin­ning of Au­gust,” says the vice dean of the UAB’s In­ter­na­tional Re­la­tions de­part­ment, Màrius Martínez. Among the sub­jects on offer are courses in psy­chol­ogy, lead­er­ship and ne­go­ti­a­tion tech­niques, his­tory, ge­og­ra­phy, Eu­ro­pean eco­nomic in­te­gra­tion and even nan­otech­nol­ogy. Stu­dents from other coun­tries also do the courses, al­low­ing them to study abroad with­out hav­ing to do a full term at the uni­ver­sity. “For UAB stu­dents, our sum­mer school al­lows us to prac­tise what we call “in­ter­na­tion­al­i­sa­tion at home”: stu­dents who, for what­ever rea­son, can­not go abroad have the chance to do courses in Eng­lish while meet­ing for­eign stu­dents with­out leav­ing the UAB,” adds Martínez.

A flex­i­ble term

The Pom­peu Fabra Uni­ver­sity also has sum­mer courses in its Barcelona In­ter­na­tional Sum­mer School (BISS), a pro­gramme of courses in Cata­lan, Span­ish and Eng­lish, in which the stu­dents share class­rooms with for­eign stu­dents. The courses are also aca­d­e­m­i­cally recog­nised and are avail­able from five times a week to just once a week, and in­clude sub­jects in art and cul­ture, econ­omy and in­no­va­tion, global cities, jus­tice and law, so­cial mea­sures and di­a­logue, mind, life and en­vi­ron­ment, so­cial analy­sis and meth­ods and data. The UPF also of­fers, in this case to the gen­eral pub­lic, the Plurilin­gual Cam­pus, which al­lows par­tic­i­pants to learn about four lan­guages and cul­tures through­out July at a re­duced price.

Courses and cam­pus

Cat­alo­nia’s Poly­tech­nic Uni­ver­sity (UPC) has a wide range of ac­tiv­i­ties dur­ing the sum­mer, but one of the most in­ter­est­ing is in math­e­mat­ics (aimed at sec­ondary school pupils and stu­dents in vo­ca­tional train­ing). This sum­mer will see the third edi­tion of the Sci­en­tific Cam­pus of the Fac­ulty of Math­e­mat­ics and Sta­tis­tics, while the Barcelona Tech Math Sum­mer Camp is an in­tro­duc­tion to higher maths. Also in Barcelona is the Young Pro­fes­sional in Space, in which the par­tic­i­pants get to build a satel­lite. The UPC also of­fers ac­tiv­i­ties in other places in Cat­alo­nia. Sec­ondary stu­dents who like tech can find ac­tiv­i­ties in the UPC in Man­resa, such as Friki­week, which has talks and pre­sen­ta­tions in the area of ICT. Mean­while, in Ter­rassa they offer courses and work­shops in in­dus­trial en­gi­neer­ing, aero­space, the au­dio­vi­sual sec­tor, and mul­ti­me­dia tech­nol­ogy. Vi­lanova i la Geltrú has the Uni­ver­sity of the Mediter­ranean Cam­pus, of­fer­ing ac­tiv­i­ties on so­ci­ety, tech­nol­ogy and the en­vi­ron­ment to the gen­eral pub­lic. Fi­nally, Berguedà hosts the Cata­lan Sum­mer Uni­ver­sity of Na­ture, for any­one in­ter­ested in nat­ural re­sources.

fea­ture

Learning languages

All Catalan universities offer language courses in the summer. The most in-demand is English, but there are also foreign students and residents who want to improve their Spanish and/or Catalan. In many cases, anyone over 16 can sign up.

Vocations

The Summer University of Science and Technology in the UPC in Castelldefels: CasTECHdefels, offers activities to school pupils, teachers and the general public, including families with children. Other options include learning to fly a drone or make homemade beer.

From witches to photographing the stars

The courses and activities organised outside the Barcelona area are no less diverse. The Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona, for example, runs Bruixes, enverinadores, remeieres i sanadores (about witches) in Arnes, and El que no t’expliquen al CSI (about forensics) in Móra d’Ebre. Girona University will have 50 courses, with new ones, such as Active ageing, The art of making good decisions and The transformative power of failure. Lleida University also has some 60 courses on, for example, how to photograph stars, the music industry or detecting abuse in children. And don’t forget Catalonia’s Open University (UOC) also has distance courses.

Helping to decide

Being a teenager and having to choose what to study is not easy. A good way of getting a taste of university is the UPF’s Junior Campus, which is aimed at secondary school pupils who will soon be coming up for their final exams.

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