About this site (updated 2004):
Eastchance has been started by two East European students with a genuine interest in doing more for themselves and their CVs than just passing exams at the university. With no other way to travel outside our home country but scholarships and grants, we slowly discovered how well-guarded is in Eastern Europe the information about such opportunities. We have gathered over time a relevant amount of data about events and opportunities and have realized from personal experience how useful and fun these can be. We thought we should do something useful for other students just like us, who might just not be as lucky as we were when we first ran into such information a few years ago.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first site providing such information especially targeted to students from Central and Eastern Europe. The events listed contain some form of financial aid directly targeted to this category of students, or to a larger one, in which CEE students are included. Why is this targeting necessary? Well, did you ever try to use a search engine to dig after such events? We did, and did, and did…. They never return relevant answers. When you finally get some, they either refer to conferences with a participation fee of USD 500, or to scholarships for which only Taiwanese students are eligible. So, how about us? Hope this site helps… We thought it was badly needed.
The site is not run for profit; the banners you see are aimed at helping us recover the small investment needed to start this site. We had the idea sometime in the beginning of 2000; due to the work involved, the first version of the site went on-line towards the end of August, same year.
Our names are Costin Uzun and Ovidiu Petreaca, and we're both Romanians. For the last few years, we have been both intensive applicants, and sometimes participants, to different international student events. We couldn't have gone there without financial aid; we couldn't have got finaid, if we had not learned how to write a CV or a motivation letter. Even those would have been useless if we hadn't known that such events exist. This is how EastChance.com was born. If you will notice a certain bias of the announcements in EastChance.com in favor of events dealing with economics and social science topics, you're right. It reflects our own preferences - as we said, this site was born by gathering the results of our own searches. It's up to you, however, to help us enrich the site, by adding events from other areas.
Costin graduated in the summer of 2002 from Ovidius University in Constanta, Romania, with a major in Finance. At the beginning of July 2002 Costin joined the Bucharest office of Procter&Gamble, as an Assistant Brand Manager. He is responsible for doing every single programming part of the site, for its design and the EastChance logo, as well as for the fine-tuning of the documents' formatting. From December 2000, he has also been accountable for the daily run of the site.
Ovidiu has a MA in Sociology from the Central European University, in Warsaw, Poland, (class of 2000) and a BA in International Management from the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, Constanta (class of 1999). Having worked for the Boston Consulting Group, a management consultancy until August 2002, Ovidiu had practically nothing to do with the daily run of the website since January 2001. Ovidiu is currently an MBA student at the Harvard Business School in Boston, US. He came with the initial idea of the website, its structure, and its guiding principles. He formatted most of the documents in our databases in the beginning, and had the idea of the slogan. Which slogan?
Your future starts here!
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About EastChance.com
