Erasmus was awesome. I remember getting a card as a lone American in Dresden.<p>One difference I recall was that being a university student in Germany felt like a super-power compared to my time in the U.S. Everything seemed less expensive, subsidized travel and housing, lots of events hosted for you to meet people…
When I was a digital nomad I enjoyed meeting folks from Europe everywhere I went that were on Erasmus. They always had created a little pocket of community and were welcoming to strangers.
For those new to this (like me), Erasmus seems to be a non-profit that facilitates studying abroad: <a href="https://www.esn.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.esn.org</a><p>Can anyone else explain more?
That reminds me that I did some visualisation of Erasmus data for a data-vis course in uni<p><a href="https://erasmus.robinfellinger.eu/" rel="nofollow">https://erasmus.robinfellinger.eu/</a><p>Was quite fun playing around and exploring that dataset.
Top comments are in line with a movie I saw where all the kids were in Erasmus and it seemed like the ideal way to hook up/connect with potential lovers one might not have connected with in any other context.
I lived abroad for a while. So I wasn't the right demographic for Erasmus being American. But I made so many friends who were participants. I ended meeting them at the same bars and cafes. Where students and just graduated, former students would meet and hangup.<p>I didn't get to do any exchange programs just 4 years of my nose to grindstone. And I feel like I really missed out and messed up.
How in the world is it legal for that dataset to be freely available for anyone to download when it clearly contains uniquely identifiable personal information?<p>I can literally identify multiple people!<p>Why hasn't this data at the very least been aggregated in such a way that any random idiot like me can't just take a quick look and identify at least 2 people in less than 5 minutes?<p>How is this in line with GDPR? Certainly the exceptions for statistics don't totally eliminate the requirement for them to minimize the data collection and publication to only fulfill the requirements.<p>What legal basis do they have to make personal information of thousands of people freely available with no anonymization at all?<p>What public benefit is there in making public the data for specific people, instead of non-uniquely identifiable buckets of people?
Meh, I didn't qualify as a STEM student. Meantime all female colleagues studying "Spanish" and "Italian" had parties and sex of their lives in Valencia, Granada, Milan, Barcelona, Sicily, and others. For me the Erasums could be shut down. Don't even remember me this program.