From 19 to 23 October 2026, Comillas Pontifical University hosted the EUPeace Staff Week under the theme “Building a Shared EUPeace Campus Experience: Welcoming Culture and ‘Internationalisation at Home’”. The people who look after mobility, student services and digital tools at our partner universities left their screens and met in person, together with student representatives. They spent the week turning a shared ambition into concrete plans. That ambition is a campus that feels like one, wherever students and staff happen to be, and an international experience for every student, even those who never leave their home university.
Getting started
The week opened at Comillas’ Alberto Aguilera building. Elisa Aracil Fernández, Vice-Rector for Strategy, Internationalisation and Academic Planning, and María Amalia Silva de Oliva, Director of the International Relations Service, gave the welcome. They were joined by Teresa Morales de la Fuente, EUPeace Director at Comillas, and Alicia Llamas Blázquez, EUPeace Mobility Coordinator at Comillas. The opening session set out Comillas’ own internationalisation strategy and why welcoming culture sits at its heart.
Before any planning could start, everyone needed the same picture. A “Digital Campus Status Quo” session reviewed what the Alliance has already built and what is still missing, giving all participants a common knowledge base for the days ahead.
Three teams, one campus
From Tuesday, the group moved into three teams, each looking at the shared campus from a different angle. The Facilitating Mobility team started with a simple but important question: what makes students feel at home? Together with the Erasmus Student Network (ESN), they explored how buddy systems can help newcomers settle in. They also shared good practice, talked about more sustainable ways to travel and looked at how to measure the impact of mobility.
Meanwhile, the Campus and Student Life team focused on the people at the centre of the Alliance: our students. They discussed the role of the EUPeace Student Council and ambassadors, started planning the second Campus Festival and looked for new ways to bring the student community closer together.
The Digitisation Office, for its part, worked on the tools that make all of this possible. The team set priorities for the final project year, took the “UWB Moodle” pilot live and brainstormed how grades and credits can travel smoothly between universities in joint programmes.
Coming back together
The teams met regularly to compare progress. A roundtable on what a shared EUPeace campus means in practice set the tone. On Thursday, the whole group turned to the European Student ID, discussing what has worked so far, where the gaps are and what needs to happen next. The week closed with a joint reflection on concrete actions for the months ahead.
But Staff Weeks are also about people. Many participants work together every week through video calls and shared documents, and over coffee breaks and lunches they could finally put faces to names. The mix of people mattered too. Staff working on mobility, student services and digital tools rarely sit at the same table, and the student representatives brought the view of the people the Alliance is built for. These informal conversations sparked new ideas and built the trust that makes cooperation easier from a distance. In a week about welcoming culture, participants got to experience it first-hand as guests at Comillas.
What’s next
Participants left Madrid with shared priorities and a stronger network of colleagues. The coming months will depend on keeping that collaboration going, between the mobility, student life and digital teams and between partner universities, so that progress in one area supports the others. By working together across groups and borders, EUPeace moves closer to a campus where everyone feels welcome, whether they study abroad or experience internationalisation at home.
