PRESIDENTIAL VISION
A short welcome by the President I am beyond excited to be presiding the 38th National Selection Conference of EYP Greece that will take place in Thessaloniki. I have spent the last weeks working on the vision of the session and cannot wait to work on it more with the rest of the leadership and officials that will be joining us soon! Feel free to always approach me in case you have questions! -Michi
Michael Ernst (AT) The President’s Vision The academic vision for Thessaloniki 2018 will cover multiple aspects. These include highlighting the educational value of session topics, creating interactive preparatory documents for the delegates coming to the session, a focus on participant well-being, as well as interactive session elements. Educational value of session topics Thessaloniki 2018 will aim to only include topics that bring a new aspect of politics or society closer to the delegates of the session. This means that topic questions covering conflicts and societal issues everybody has an opinion on will have less priority than topics covering new technologies, legal challenges of our modern society or niche economy sectors. By discussing those topics without overwhelming first-time delegates with overly technical problems, we aim to maximise the educational value delegates will get out of the session. The topics of the session will be created by the session leadership through the KÜpping Topic Drafting Cycle in an extensive, interactive fashion. Interactive preparatory documents To enable delegates to understand topic questions out of their comfort zone, a new approach to Topic Overviews will have to be made, breaking conventions with the classic text-only documents we are used to, which will be replaced by an interactive variant, aiming to speak to different learning types and make Topic Overviews as appealing to read/watch/listen to as possible.
Participants’ well-being Participants’ well-being is something that has only caught our attention recently in the network. As the President of the session, I would like to actively participate in ensuring this is taken into consideration when planning the different programme points. Coffee replacing sleep and the socalled “post-EYP depression” are things we celebrate and often pride ourselves in, when in reality they are clearly negative and should be countered. This what I aim to achieve with the rest of the leadership. Interactive session elements Whether a Press Conference, Topic Understanding Night or a Lobby Event - many ideas of interactive session elements float around in the network at the moment. Getting together the delegates before the General Assembly is, in my opinion, a worthwhile undertaking, since it furthers the academic quality of the event while conveying different skills and experiences (depending on the type of interactive activity).