A 21-year-old woman from Cagliari, Valentina Simeone, is the first European student to enter Tehran University with an Erasmus scholarship after she outclassed colleagues from other nine EU universities. The European Union has decided to broaden the horizons of cultural exchange by granting 136 funded scholarships to young people from Iran, Iraq and Yemen for their postgraduate studies in European countries and to offer an EU citizen a six-month study period (EUR 1000/month) in Tehran, given the lack of security in Iraq and Yemen. When she arrived in Tehran in September, Valentina prompted the setting up of new relations and forms of university cooperation between the Islamic Republic of Iran of the ayatollahs and the Western world.
Valentina had studied English, Arabic and German at Cagliari’s Faculty of Languages but not a word of Farsi. When she first arrived in Tehran she had no friends or acquaintances and the university in Tehran was not prepared to integrate a new student with her mysterious Western ways. “For many of my friends and even for some teachers, I was the first European they had seen in their lives,” she said. “In the beginning there was complete confusion, then things slowly got better, also thanks to the help of the Italian Embassy,” she explained.
After her experience in Tehran, Valentina is planning her dissertation on the relations between Italy and Iran and will ask one of her professors in Iran to act as coordinator together with another from Cagliari. For the future, she hopes to complete a Master’s programme in Political Science and maybe start a diplomatic career. Meanwhile, she wants to invite all her Iranian friends to Italy.
