25/08/2026
Alumni Story 🎓
Today, we’re hearing from Rebecca, one of our MIREES alumni, who takes us back to her first year in Forlì — in her own words.
“
When you start your Master at 23, you are still naive, dumb in certain ways, and immature in others, but also full of curiosity, vitality, and energy at rocket levels. That was me, at least: freshly back from a year abroad working in an NGO in Romania, enthusiastically jumping straight into my next life chapter in Forlì, without thinking too much about the future.
And I didn’t really know what to expect. It didn’t really matter, though: life is a vortex in your twenties. And at MIREES, everything was new: a new environment, new friends, a new city, a new life to build, new routines mingling with old habits. And, above all, a new and totally different Master’s programme from anything I had known until then. MIREES was, and still is, unique in this sense: with its peculiar structure, inspired by international academic practices from across Europe, I had to get familiar with multiple course formats, presentations (never done before!), practical-oriented research approaches, inter- and multidisciplinary perspectives, and a strongly international composition of both students and professors. MIREES aggregates around a specific field of knowledge, but even more aggregates people sharing the same intellectual curiosity and fascination for Eastern Europe.
And then there was life in Forlì. It was a bittersweet, intimate, goliardic bubble: we met in the same bars at night after meeting in the same classes during the day, with the same drinks and beers in our hands, talking about the same topics over and over again, without ever getting tired of them, or of each other. Forlì was out of space and time for us, our small MIREES dimension.”