I've been practicing aggressive skating for years. In a skatepark if you look around you'll see people learning guided by the pleasure of learning. You try the movement, fall down and you try again, non-stop, and you load yourself with energy when you see others trying too. That's my reference on what a learning environment should be.

I started my studies at the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, I got good grades but I did not enjoy learning. After a year and a half I came to the conclusion that I hated my teachers. Everything was like a bad theater where they pretended to teach us and we students learned.

I tried to convince some colleagues to create a website where we could criticize teachers and express our opinions about the university system, but nobody wanted to get into trouble.

Shortly after, I enrolled in the National Student Association, there we had meetings with the Minister of Education and we got involved in the Bologna process, which is a protocol signed by all European Ministries of Education on certain common principles to practice in teaching, among them student-centered learning. However, none of this was actually applied in the real system.

After four years of activity we realized that none of the universities had changed, we saw that the universities were embedded in an obsolete system of education in which teachers say what needs to be done and the students just follow.

When I finished my studies I no longer wanted to be an engineer but to transform the universities, the educational system. I knew that making the change from within was very difficult but maybe we could create a place to show that another way of educating is possible, a place where the students are the protagonists and scriptwriters of their own learning. A model based on the freedom of people to explore their passions. Thus, the idea of ​​the Alternative University was born, and for eight years we've been committed to building this model step by step.

We spent almost four years developing the learning model on which our university would be based. We started with peer learning or peer instruction, learning from each other; little by little we added mentees, consultancies, among other things. After that the challenge was to make it sustainable because until then we relied only on sponsorships and own funds. Everyone in the team felt that if we did not show that universities with self-directed learning were possible and effective, we would end up corroborating the idea that there is no alternative.

After eight years of dedication to the project I felt the need of a pause. I traveled for two years around the world, meeting people who were also trying to change the model of learning in universities. This trip changed my perspective, I realized that our idea needed a holistic strategy because we were working on a micro scale.

Traveling has allowed me to have a broader and critical view of how things work in the world, my ability to empathize and my motivations have changed. My initial motivation for the Alternative University was that young people should decide on their life, build their way based on their passions, generate a certain social impact. However, I was not aware of the privileged level of which I am part of, just by living in a city, being a man and being white.

After my trip I began to understand that there are other realities and social conditions different from mine. Traveling made me realize that I was trying to build something new but biased by my privileged position. Now what matters to me is that young people see a little further, that they also realize the existence of the margins of today's society, and that they focus their energy there, in those places where people really try to change the order of things.

There are different types of movements that for me are part of that periphery that is transforming the world: Slow Food, Indigenous Movements, Open Sources Softwares, Food Sovereignty, Permaculture and many others. Those that push from that corner so that the system and the model change. These groups share the same values ​​and the same alternative vision about how human beings should interact, but they press in different areas. They also naturally attract young people because of the need they have to find their place in the world too, to become visible and to build a new model of society, more inclusive, with a logic and a way of thinking that are different to the current one.

The change I want to see is related to transforming our systems, which are based on greed, segregation, on the need to have power and control over things, that is the way in which the current world is structured.

I dream of a society where everything is done on a small scale and humanly, a collaborative world where people cooperate and learn from each other.