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It is not a small goal that the founders of website Europe for Students have set for themselves.

“We want to link students across Europe”, Thomas Brünne told German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. The website wants to help students who attempt to go for a semester abroad get through the jungle of different education systems, find the cool places to hang out, a job, or a room- basically, all you need for studying and living, and all that across Europe. So if you’ve ever wondered which universities provides the right classes for your semester abroad in France, how to find a cheap stay in Barcelona, or if Vilnius is really the new party- capital, you can find the information here.

In theory, at least, because so far only few cities are in the profile. And even though the idea is to have user generated content, making students from cities all over Europe describe their universities and cities, there is no “comment” or “edit” function anywhere to be seen, except for the news blog. Feeling Web 2.0? Not exactly.

A rather cool feature is the European News Blog, where university- or student- life- related news can be found. They do like those google maps with tons of little pins for different places, something that’s not all that helpful if you don’t know a city at all. It might be a good idea to simply provide information on the nearest public transportation stop, e.g. “close to central station”.

The website is provided in four different languages, showing information in English, German, French, and Italian. Even though some sentence constructions are a little off, this is certainly a good idea. Only the news blog is exempt from that, which is a bit sad and something they will hopefully work on for those interested in university life abroad.

The problem is that this website combines existing ideas. Information on nightlife, universities, roommates and jobs can be found online already, and most of the time they’re presented better, e.g. making it easy for you to find a bar in Berlin Friedrichshain or an apartment near Hamburg’s Sternschanze. Here, they give you a list of bars, clubs, and students dorms to scroll down, so unless you’re a cab driver and know a city’s every corner, or have a map right next to you, you can’t locate those places easily (where are the google maps when you need them?).

The success of this project depends on whether it has anything to offer beyond combining existing services, and on that part it doesn’t do all that good. Information on the different educational systems and universities are brief and can’t be altered or extended by users. For now, this is a good idea, but the implementation needs to be worked on.

By Jessica Binsch