My Validation Experience by Duarte Silva from Portugal

[duartem...@gmail.com]

Hello everyone! My name is Duarte Silva and I’m 21 years. I’m from the capital of Portugal, Lisbon. During this letter, I’m going to talk about me, about 3 of my volunteering experiences and at last, about the certification.

I consider myself a very pro-active and helpful person since child. I play futsal since my 10 years old and for me it was always a pleasure to work on a team, it never was the wins or loses but the effort that all gave to accomplish something. During my High School, I’ve made my first volunteering – I helped my team to raise money for the maintenance of the club. Unfortunately, this didn’t work and it shut down. After that, I’ve gained interest about activities outside curricular ones, that could help me with my soft skills – for example, I was a little bit shy and with volunteering, I needed to talk to people that didn’t knew all the time. Now that I’m at the University, in the Institute Polytechnic of Setúbal studying Logistics and Distribution Management, I’ve already made some volunteering, most of them about integration of new students, presentations about my University or reception of foreign students. So, for me it was clear that I’ve learned a lot during this volunteering experiences and obtained transversal competences that could help me in the job market. When I heard about EVAVOL Project, I really loved the idea because it makes all the sense! For example, I’ve a course unit that is Human Resources and we had to study what is integration and reception of new employees in a company so, for me, receiving new students and talk with foreign students about my University was the same. With this idea, I tried the certification and I primarily emailed my course coordinator because I didn’t know who to talk about the certification or the project itself. I explained in what consists and he said briefly: “Ok, I don’t know anything about the program but we can arrange a meeting a try to certificate”. After that, he said that I should talk with the Vice-President of IPS, because she was the only one that knew this project, so I did. During this conversation, she briefly said to me that it would be a very long and bureaucratic process and it was impossible to do with so little time. Unfortunately, they could not help me with the certification in time.

I think, in conclusion, that there are still steps to take in educational institutions to make this project work, maybe because some of these institutions are not so open minded and just say that is really bureaucratic to get the certification. Still, I wanted to share my negative experience so everyone could understand that the institutions are not so open as we think. Maybe in the future, it could get easier for the students to get this kind of certifications, at least, I hope so!

Thank you everyone for your time!

Best Wishes,

Duarte Silva

(PS: Bellow, there are two photos about one of my volunteering projects!)