History Book of BEST
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The members of LBG ENSTA participate regularly to trainings, bePROUD in 2005 and 2006, beRICHER in 2004, 2006 and 2007. In 2004, Jiji had the idea of a
French FR training; this was named PICSOU and organized at ENSTA.
We organized a Cultural Exchange with Cluj-Napoca and Lodz at the end of 2005.
Beside all these BEST events, we use to meet the administration of the university every year to let them follow our projects and maintain their support.
To follow the creation of ParisTech, a collective entity that includes eleven of the most prestigious French institutes of education and research, the LBG was renamed ENSTA ParisTech in September 2008.
At PM 2008 in Bucharest, our LBG was suspended because of logistic problems during the Winter Course 08.
Right now we are a really motivated team of around 15 active members loaded with experience and the BEST spirit. Our plans for the future are to send more students abroad, to organize a Cultural Exchange, and to get more involved internationally. In a few years, everyone will know us as “LBG French Kiss”.
Story of LBG Gdansk
During a survival camp in spring 2003, student of Gdansk University of Technology, Bartosz Lipnicki met people from LBG Warsaw. They told him about what BEST is and few months later, he came again to Warsaw to see how Engineering Job Fair by LBG Warsaw looked like. Impressed by this event, he came back to Gdansk and collected a group that created BEST group in Gdansk.
After summer 2003, full of meetings with BESTies, WorkShops and knowledge transfers, an Observer application was sent to the board of BEST International. On September 30th, 2003 LBG Gdansk became an Observer group. Bartosz Lipnicki, Dominika Markowska and
Wojciech Syrocki became first board of our LBG. After yearly status of Observer, at PM 2004, we became a Baby Member and a year later at PM 2006 we achieved Full Member status.
ThefirsteventmadebyLBGGdanskwasFOKA2004‘Students’OrganizationsFair.Afterwards, our group organized RM for Mongolia (all Polish LBGs were still in this region then). Later, in summer 2004, we organized Cultural Exchange with LBG Berlin and LBG Turin.
LBG Gdansk is an innovative group. Our LBG members were ones that introduced BEC to
BEST and together with LBG Warsaw made first BEC in 2004 and organized in 2005 our first
BEST Course as an engineering competition.
Successive years of our existence brought new events and involvement of our members in
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BEST International. From 2005 we organize Meetings with Employers, in 2006 we organized
TrainShop, in the year 2006/07 our founder Bartosz Lipnicki became the President of XIX board of BEST International and member of our LBG Andrzej Piotrowski was the Regional
Advisor.
Since 2005 we organize annually BEST courses. The topic of the first one was robotics.
The next courses’ topics were Maritime Industry in 2006, Transport & Logistics in 2007 and
Architecture of Gdansk region in 2008. Moreover, in 2007/08 we made another CE with LBGs in Brussels and Nancy and we were the host of national edition of BEC 2008.
We organize yearly party events at our University, e.g. BEST birthday party and the BEST Day (an outdoor party during Students’ Festival - Juwenalia).
Nowadays, at the beginning of 2009, there are 38 active members, 20 observers and 30 alumni in BEST Gdansk.
Story of LBG Ghent
The magical fairytale of LBG Ghent began in 1995: Marianne Edlund and Guy Brusselmans were just too late to apply for the XIIIth General Assembly in Patras and had to wait for 6 months to officially make LBG Ghent a part of BEST. Nevertheless, they didn’t wait for this and already organised the first Summer Course in Ghent in the summer of 1995. Ghent really tasted the BEST spirit and we certainly made a nice first impression. At the Presidents’ Meeting in Trondheim, Ghent went into BEST history as being the first group to ever organise a course without being an official BEST Group! We had already earned our reputation...
During the XIVth General Assembly in Tallinn, Estonia, we were accepted as a Baby Member and to raise this reputation even higher, we immediately ran together with the other Belgian LBGs to organise the XVth General Assembly. Before we could believe it, some 150 students from all over Europe were gathering in Ghent, listening to HRH Prince Laurent who officially opened the XVth General Assembly. At this GA, Ghent was welcomed as a Full Member of
BEST. This was celebrated by electing Guy as the first, but certainly not the last, Ghentie to be a member of the BEST International Board.
LBG Ghent still kept its innovative spirit from its starting days: in 2002, Amelie (LBG Ghent) and Mirjam (LBG Eindhoven) decided to take the challenge and organise the first BEST
European Engineering Competition (BEEC). The BEEC event later resulted in BEC (BEST Engineering Competition) events.
Two years later, LBG Ghent was ready for its next challenge: organising the Presidents’ Meeting of BEST. Thanks to the amazing commitment of all our LBG members the Presidents’ Meeting was a huge success, leaving a very good impression on the university, the city of Ghent and all of our international guests.
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In 2008, LBG Ghent was elected to host the first final of the European BEST Engineering
Competition (EBEC) in 2009. So, LBG Ghent has been a dynamic group in BEST since it all started in Trondheim in 1995, and today it’s still looking towards a sunny future!
Story of LBG Gliwice
Long, long time ago, when the first BEST groups in Europe started existing, there arise an idea... idea to create another local group at Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice. At this time there were actually only 2 BEST groups in Poland - in Warsaw and Krakow.
The beginning of “BEST Gliwice” was very hard; however with “helping hand” of BEST
Warsaw everything became much easier. Official gossips say that it was established at
20th of April 1994 with 15 members. At 6th of November 1994 at 12th BEST congress in Timisoara they got status “BEST Observer Group”. Then they became “Baby Member
Group” at 1st of May 1995 at 13th congress in Patras. Finally in 1997/98 they obtained “Full
Member” status, voting and membership rights.
During 15 years existence of BEST group in Gliwice some traditions has been born...
One of the most important traditions is cyclic events like “Modern Student Fairs” which was organized for the 6th time in the year 2008 or “Engineering Job Fairs” - 5th edition in March this year. Their traditional event is also recruitment which is organized two times every year.
BEST Gliwice can be proud of many achievements for example:
•they have constantly around 50 active members for several years,
•their actual office is probably the biggest one of all BEST groups having area above 100m2,
•they’ve organized double summer courses (academic and leisure course) in
2004, 2005 and 2007,
•They created international and very popular committee “LBG Mongolia” which is gathering group of people with special objects of interest and ideas for spending free time, ect.
If you want to get to know more about BEST Gliwice you are welcome to their web page: www.BEST.gliwice.pl
Story of LBG Gothenburg
The history of LBG Gothenburg goes back to 1992, when it was elected as a baby member in GA Liege, having LBG Stockholm as a nurse. One year later, in Warsaw GA LBG Gothenburg got the full member status, and since then has been an active LBG in both international and
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regional level.
Soon, in 1996 Gothenburg had its first international boardie; Jonas Murby became president of the International Board of BEST. Later, in 1999, Anna Nielsen contributed as the GM secretary. LBG Gothenburg also actively participated in the first general meeting organized by all Swedish LBGs of that time in April 2000.
Story of LBG Graz
From Portuguese Beaches to the Austrian Alps...... |
the history of LBG Graz |
Just another time that he fell into the water after standing on his surf board… But surfing was not the only thing the young guy from Graz learned during his stay in Lisbon. He established a lot of friendships and a connection to the local BEST group there.
In 2005 when Christoph Troschl came back from the sunny Portuguese beaches he also brought the BEST spirit with him and infected other students at Graz University of Technology. These students were so motivated that at GA in Zagreb (2006) the observer group Graz was created. After the first successful motivation weekend, at PM in Ghent (2006) we became
Baby LBG Graz.
But being a Baby LBG was not enough. In order to develop our skills in organizing events we performed a cultural exchange with Eindhoven, Netherlands in February and April did some teambuilding weekends and local promotion events.
In February 2008 we organised our first winter course with the topic: “don’t fear the error: statistics and measurements”. This was a small step for mankind, but a big step for LBG Graz. At GA in Tallinn (2008) we ran for the full membership and we are really happy that we were approved. This pushed our motivation so much that we organised a motivation weekend in order to celebrate and the central regional meeting in autumn. In December we organised our first, but not last Glühweinstandl (hot wine bar) for promotional reason.
In February 2009 we are going to have our second winter course with the topic “Run Robot Run”. We are hoping that this one would be even more fun than the first one! In March we are organising our first local engineering competition.
Be the BEST spirit always with us!
Story of LBG Grenoble
The history of LBG Grenoble is a long and most interesting story, full of passion, tradition,
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ups and downs, myths and legends (and even dinosaurs), and of course the characteristic Boulet Spirit. It is a story that gets lost in the twists and turns of time, in places where it gets difficult to differentiate tale from reality. Maybe also it is lost in part because the student board of the university inadvertently threw to the trash almost 15 years of archives, but this is another story. As for LBG Grenoble, here is the tale you have been waiting for:
Once upon a time, in a little country unlike others called France, in a quiet city surrounded by mountains called Grenoble, there was an engineering university called the National Polytechnical Institute of Grenoble (now the Grenoble Institute of Technology). And in this university, there was a student union called the Grand Cercle. This organisation, seeking international involvement in a time when the Erasmus program was in its infancy, was very active. It participated in the first meeting that would give birth to BEST in 1987 in Stockholm, hosted the next one in 1988 (in Grenoble), proposed that the statuses of the new BEST association be taken care of and registered in Grenoble in the 1988 European Week in Eindhoven; home of three international Boardies (Nicolas Chauveau of Board XIV, Ludovic
Charpentier of Board XV, Grégoire Toussaint of Board XVII) and one RA (Samir Asghar, Alpine RA 2005-2006). And of course let us not forget lots of Cultural Exchanges (Chalmers in 1999-2000, Cluj-Napoca in 2001-2002, Riga in 2002-2003, Ljubljana in 2004, Gothenburg in 2005, Kaunas in 2006, Warsaw in 2007, Kiyv in 2007-2008,Belgrade in 2008, and Istanbul & Chisinau in 2009) and local events (Motivation Weekends, Local Board Trainings, and
Local Engineering competitions)! And, let us not forget that Grenoble also organised the first
Alpine Weekend in 2003, which was the starting point to the now famous Alpine Jams!
Think that’s impressive? Think again! The LBG Grenoble was clinically dead in 1996 and almost dead in 2004 after disastrous recruitment campaigns, but like the phoenix, it resurrected from its ashes to shine stronger than ever before! And what more, it even gave birth to what is now LBG Nancy, which was at first an extension of LBG Grenoble!
You want more? You want traditions? Unfortunately, because of the most (in) famous Boulet Spirit, most are just too politically incorrect to describe, but a quick search in Youtube on “LBG Grenoble” should prove enough to satisfy your curiosity. As for the little song to end our story, here it is:
“In Grenoble Never Sober
In Grenoble Raise your glass
And drink again, again, again Drink again, again, again”
Story of LBG Helsinki
Delegates from Helsinki participated in the first International week organized in Stockholm in 1987. The idea of an organization like BEST was born in this event. LBG Helsinki is one of the founding members of BEST and has been a member since the first General Assembly
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organized in Berlin in 1989. The first course LBG Helsinki organized was a summer course in
1992 called Power Production and Environment.
In 1994 a legendary summer course “Mobile Communication - connecting people” was organized together with Nokia. During the course the people from Nokia were showing the participants a state of the art mobile phone they had as a work phone. According to today’s standards the phone was big, but it still made the participants green with envy since none of the students had a mobile phone at that time. 15 years later in 2008 a summer course called “Developing good, better and BEST products” was organized and again Nokia was one of the sponsors. This time around everyone had a mobile phone. The times might have changed, but the BEST spirit was as high as it was 15 years before.
In 2002 the idea of Sauna Crawling was born while planning the summer course. The point of Sauna Crawling is to go in teams to different saunas in the university area (and there are quite a few saunas here) and do a different task in every sauna. Nowadays Sauna Crawling has become a tradition in LBG Helsinki.
Story of LBG Iasi
If it wasn’t for a girl went on Erasmus at the University of Stockholm in 1997 who knows when BEST would have arrived in Iasi. There she met two Romanians that were already in BEST and soon they convinced her (Anca) how BEST can help the students from Iasi. Struck by BEST values, she soon started dreaming about the possibility of the University of Iasi joining the organization. The path that BEST Iasi needed to take was a rocky one: after applying in fall 1998 and spring 1999 just to be rejected as a observer of BEST, the group from Iasi didn’t give up and decided to register the NGO and applied for a third time to become part of BEST at PM Budapest 2000.
Gaining the support of the University, involving many more students and registering the association in Iasi, year 2000 turned out to be yet another time a lucky one. Iasi was accepted as an observer of BEST in 2000. In the next years BEST Iasi became soon baby and with the guidance of LBG Timisoara, a full member in 2002 at GA France.
From then, the number of members grew more and more, and the LBG developed into a strong and united group. From year to year, the students from Iasi University found in the Job fairs, BEST Courses, Technical Festivals and Competition organised by BEST Iasi another chance to follow their dream, to have fun, learn and improve their skills.
In the same time the LBG wanted to give something in return to BEST and started to apply for hosting different internal events. Reaching the maturity needed, LBG Iasi took another challenge and decided to help new group from Chisinau to find their own path through the
BEST family.
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After almost 10 years of existence, more than 100 members and alumni can say: “we are proud to be a part of BEST Iasi!”
Story of LBG Istanbul
In a sunny day of June 2000, some students of Istanbul Technical University got together and founded a student organisation in their university. During 3 years, they did amazing jobs, but then, they decided to do more, but how could it be possible?
Everything related with BEST started in a dinner of local group’s board in June 2003. The president of that organization told to the secretary: “There is something called BEST, can you search it and maybe next year, we can join...” The secretary of the group searched
BEST on Internet, exchanged e-mails, then asked to the group for the final confirmation of the observer application; and 3 months after hearing the name of BEST, the group became Observer Istanbul ( September 2003 ) . One year passed with hard job of establishing a Local Group, organizing a mini CE for LBG Stockholm and a Regional Meeting for East Region, after them, making the T-Shirts of GA 2004 during the event and sending them from
Istanbul before the end of the event was another success story of the Observer Istanbul. After a great summer with all visited SCs, PM2004 arrived where Observer Istanbul became a LBG.
After visited by LBG Athens in winter 2005, we made our first promotion for SCs where we got the third position of the applications in the whole BEST world. Then, the first SC arrived.
It was a remarkable event since with all problems and the lack of experience; participants agreed that it doesn’t look like as a first course ever done by that group... The success also came with 11 couples happened during the event too... This became also one of the causes of becoming full member of BEST in PM 2005.
Beside all other great events such as BACo, Cultural Exchanges, Regional Meeting, etc..., the year 2007-2008 became a remarkable year in the history of BEST where LBG Istanbul is the first and only LBG who organized 5 Season Courses and 1 TrainShop (Be Richer V) in
5 Season! Amazing ha?
Now, we are thinking what we can do more and unforgettable. Any suggestions?
Story of LBG Kaunas
To start with, in 25 of April LBG Kaunas celebrated its 5 years anniversary!!! We are growing and becoming stronger and stronger. How it started? Well, we tell you a short fairy tale.
Once upon a time there were three little princesses Justina, Katerina and Daiva, who wanted
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to create little but nice and crazy land and call it LBG Kaunas.
They travelled through whole Europe looking for help. After long search in 2004 03 12 princesses found a lot of nice and friendly people at BEST North-East Regional Meeting Riga and there represented their idea. And in 2004 in Copenhagen the delegates of huge kingdom of BEST let these princesses to realize their idea - create LBG Kaunas. There were a lot of sunny and dark days for this little land, but these princesses and the other princes and princesses (Justina, Mindaugas, Daiva, Edita, Lina), who followed the idea of hard working, crazy and funny land, managed to get ahead bravely.
During theses 5 years in this LBG Kaunas land were invited lot of people to take part at the events like: JAMAICA_RM_2005, SC?06 “The birth of BEST Anthem: e-music a Creative
Approach”, “WC’08: WeCare and we are ready to promote”, “WC’09 - BECuddly”. At 2006 LBG Kaunas represented beautiful motherland Lithuania to friends from Grenoble and Torino (during Cultural Exchanges), hosted International BEST Board, LEMONS in cold 2007 winter.
Of course LBG Kaunas didn’t forget its people and for them created lots of amusements and challenges: unforgettable Christmas parties, challenging BEST Decisions, gripping X-Dj’s!!!
We hope that our little but nice land LBG Kaunas will fare long and happily ever after.
Story of LBG Kiev
How it all began?
In spring 2007, the first people out of our members found out about BEST and attended the first event - Motivation Weekend in Zaporizhzhya. Since then, our story has started. We officially got the Observer status in July 2008. Before that was a year of hard times with
BEST but not in BEST. That had a positive effect at any way: we didn’t despair, as we had to build our team, work harder and push forward to keep our motivation high, and finally it helped to come as BEST group already, but strong as Observer, and having got enough experience to run for Baby in a couple of months.
Even before getting the Observer status we made a good deal of job. Cultural Exchange at the times of “Great Depression”, Local Engineering Competition with 45 participants when applying for Observer, co-organizing all the events we could reach, participating at the
Regional Meeting in Gliwice, keeping in touch with BEST world and with our Nurse ClujNapoca, while getting support and office at the University, and involving the most motivated members who weren’t afraid of uncertainty about the future LBG Kiev, difficult to find, as we couldn’t promote our group in association with BEST itself. At the same time we elected the
Board of our group, consisting of 5 people, and formed 3 departments (FR, PR, and HR).
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Many experienced BEST members, our Regional Adviser, and 2 members of the XX Board visited Kiev, and it also helped us to find out a lot and to organize our activities better. So with about 10 people we became BEST Observer Kiev. When we heard the good news we couldn’t even celebrate together at first, as at that moment almost all the members were at different Summer Courses as co-organizers!
Having come back home, we started the next phase of our life. The first step was making
BEST Kiev bigger, that we successfully accomplished by recruiting about 15 new people, active and motivated to become BESTies. We had an outstanding Motivation Weekend that integrated our newbie’s to the team.
During PM Bucharest we accessed to Baby membership and started looking forward to achieving more!
Upon the return, we had a sharing event with our Nurses and in early December we organized a 3-day career-related event, including trainings, engineering competition, and company presentations. In the beginning of 2009 we organized another company day, recruited 15 new members and had another Motivation Weekend. In April we organized LEC as a round of EBEC. Moreover, this year we are organizing our first Summer Course “To the Moon and Back: Airspace Technologies for the Future”, and the 9th Regional Meeting of Mongolia, also known as the Central-East Region.
There are so many plans and so much motivation to implement them! After everything that we have lived through together, we can obviously do it!
Story of LBG Kosice
How it began
On 26thOctober 1992 was lawful by federal department of Czechoslovakia Federal republic
(Slovak republic now) establish branch of BEST on Slovakia. The first was BEST Bratislava at Slovak Technical University. Intention to constitute a LBG in Kosice on second biggest technical university on Slovakia (Technical University of Kosice) started at 3.August 1994 by
Milos Los, but in this age was official proposal from government that new LBG Kosice can perform just under LBG Bratislava. But for this process was necessary change statute of LBG Bratislava. Another chance was create a substantive statute for LBG Kosice. It was more acceptable way. New statute of LBG Kosice was created and at 22. November 1994 also LBG officially registered. First president and simultaneous statutory was Milos Los. In GA 1994
Turin became LBG KE baby member and later in GA 1996 Tallinn became full member.
From the next Presidents of LBG Kosice we can mention: Peter Zvirinsky, Mikulas Paulo, Andrej Turcan, Mikulas Fekete ( in the same year -2001Peter Zvirinsky became president,
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Lubomir Ziak vice-president of XIVth International Board), Manuela Raisova, Jan Mihalik, Emilia Sabolova, Rastislav Chomjak, Denisa Cholvadova, Ivana Cmarova, Ladislav Bartok and Mario Turcik.
Events:
•Autumn 2008 Learning Event-Technological Course: Empower by Electric Power
•Autumn 2007 Learning Event-Technological Course: Get Yourself Integrated
•Summer 2006 Leisure Event: RETRO ROOTS
•Summer 2005 Learning Event-Technological Course: My House-My Castle
•Summer 2004 Leisure Event: Crazy Outdoors-See It, Do It, Enjoy It
•Winter 2003 Learning Event-Technological Course: “Industry & Ecology-a battle of symbioses?”
•Summer 2002 Non-academic: X-Lost
•Winter 2001 Academic: How to live in e-world
•Summer 2001 Non-academic: Get medieval in 21st century...
•Summer 2000 Non-academic: Summer School of Caves 2000
•Summer 1999 Non-academic: L.O.S.T-LunAtic Outdoor Survival Trekking
•Summer 1998 Summer Course: Summer School of Caves
•Spring 1998 Non-academic: SKI WEEK of LBG Kosice, Slovakia
•Summer 1997 Summer Course: Environmental Case Studies
Except of these events LBG Kosice in cooperation with LBG Bratislava organized General Assembly in 2003.
Story of LBG Krakow
Long long time ago… In the distant, roaring nineties a strange thing happened in Kraków. There was a handsome, smart guy studying in his fifth year, who actually WANTED TO DO SOMETHING MORE…than just his master degree. So, Jacek Zięba claimed a wish of Kraków joining the Board of European Students of Technology organization.
And that’s when it all started. In 1994 Kraków obtained the Baby Member status. But as soon as it began, as abruptly it finished. Jacek has completed his studies and Baby LBG Kraków hasn’t been heard of ever since. Well, not ever… but until…
One beautiful morning, an even more beautiful girl named Monika (also known as Tere) found a real treasure: a few boxes full of folders left by Jacek in hope to be handed to posterity. Tere examined them thoroughly and found a group of enthusiasts who would follow her lead and bring BEST Kraków back to life on the international area.
So… Kraków became a full member in 1998, and they all lived happily ever after.
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