Complete Study Abroad Experience – International Mental Health Program

As employees of IRO CTU, we have realized the need to pay attention to the mental health of students. This area has been neglected and not given attention so far. As part of our experience with ou...

We wanted to familiarize technical uni students who are going abroad with possible problems and risks that may arise, so that they are able to solve them. The support materials available before mobility, during and after arrival back in the home country were supposed to ensure the students give them security and serve as a source of information for solving specific situations. Before mobility, they had the opportunity to learn various techniques as part of the training program. They acquired strategies to deal with situations that affect their mental and physical well-being. During the mobility the students had important contacts and materials from trainings available through the website. We taught students that it is important to take care of their mental health and not to be afraid to seek help if needed. By providing support, we wanted to increase the number of students going abroad and the inclusive approach of the program due to the nature of the support. The existence of the program was also intended to assure the students that the sending university is doing its best to prepare them for the journey and to motivate them to get the most out of the mobility for their personal and professional development.

The first main activity/output is an educational program for students. The program is mainly focused on the field of mental health. We have focused on possible risks, problems and challenges that students may face so that they know how to deal with them. We worked with topics such as stress, culture shock, crisis, conflicts or mindfulness. The educational program consists of 7 workshops held on the premises of universities, including partner ones. We tried to improve the workshops based on feedback from students. We also implemented them at the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague, and students from VŠCHT were also invited to the workshops at CTU. The workshops before the departure of the students cannot be held physically for everyone due to capacity reasons, which is why we have placed short informative videos on individual topics and webinars on individual topics on the project website, as an option for students who for some reason could not participate in face-to-face workshops and also audio recordings of meditation techniques. From the beginning, we had planned, in response to the situation with COVID-19, to make all workshops available online to everyone, regardless of their time or geographical possibilities. In short, we wanted our materials to be accessible to everyone, including students with disabilities. In addition to the presentations for students, presentations for lecturers have been created, which contain more information for the lecturer's context as well as the timetable for the workshops. Everything can be downloaded from the project website. An important part of the project and at the same time part of our vision was the sustainability of the project, and for that reason we placed great emphasis on the preparation of materials also for lecturers (employees of the foreign department, school psychologists, graduates of Erasmus+ mobilities, in short, anyone who will ever implement part of our COSTABEX program). An important output that we worked on during the entire project is the Handbook for lecturers, which describes in detail how to proceed during the implementation of the individual phases of COSTABEX. We also emphasize that it is not necessary to use and implement all parts of COSTABEX, but it is possible to implement only one area or part of it at other universities or secondary schools. The Handbook is placed on the website along with other materials for university representatives such as newsletters, presentations and logos. To simplify the implementation, we have created a promotional video about the project, which is also available for download. The Handbook itself contains information about the project, the training program, the newsletters as an advisory part and the website. The second main activity, the so-called counseling, was to support newsletters that students received in their e-mail boxes before departure, during their stay abroad and after their return. At the same time, we also published the content of individual emails on the website under the name Erasmus+ Journey. For their implementation, newsletter "packages" are available for download for multiple sending channels, including an instructional video. The topics of these newsletters relate to, for example, finding accommodation, language skills, study tips and student organizations, information on reverse culture shock, financial management or personal development. An important part of this output is also a link to the website, useful resources. Here we advise students where to find the most up-to-date information they need. That is, information about food, language, culture, weather, finances, first aid and more. We chose this method of counseling in order to make the project sustainable even after its end. The third main activity is a website that contains all materials for students and university representatives. We added links to counseling centers and a quiz to the part with the training program, newsletters, useful resources and handbook. An important part for us was, as well, the continuous feedback from the students, which we tried to get at regular intervals. Feedback took place in connection with workshops, advisory newsletters and the website. For the website, we worked with feedback not only from the students, but also from the ELSA counseling center (counseling center for students with specific needs). In addition to the basic activities leading to the project outputs, we held several meetings with partners for the purpose of active cooperation, sharing and possible proposals for changes in individual outputs. There were also a lot of online meetings, where we gradually shaped the aforementioned outputs.