History of BEST Moscow, told by Anna Butorova, who was a first vice president of BEST Moscow and one of its co-founders.

Key dates for our LBG:

History of BEST Board of European Students of Technology

The idea of creating BEST appeared in May, 1987 in Stockholm, Sweden, during the European conference of students from physics and mathematics high schools. At this conference the decision was made to organize the International Week in different countries twice a year, during which the European students could communicate with each other.

The Second International Week was held in Grenoble, France, in March, 1988. That meeting was attended not only by mathematicians and physicists, but also by students studying other disciplines. This meeting was followed by the International Week in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Nevertheless, the first meeting exclusively for BEST was held in Berlin, Germany in April 1989. There it was decided that BEST would consist of the Board, the General Assembly and the members. The meeting was attended by representatives from all over Europe: Barcelona, Berlin, Bologna, Budapest, Eindhoven, Grenoble, Helsinki, Lisbon, Ljubljana, London, Leuven, Paris, Stockholm, Trondheim, Turin, Vienna, Warsaw and Zurich.

At the same meeting, BEST was officially formed in order to facilitate and provide help at the matter of exchange and communication between students of European technical high schools. In November, 1990, during a meeting in Budapest the Summer Programme was presented, consisting of a set of two-week courses throughout Europe. In the summer of 1991 13 summer courses were started. For the first three years they had been supported by the program of the European Union (TEMPUS).

Community continued to grow: the new members joined, the new projects appeared. During the XIV Meeting of the General Assembly in Tallinn (Estonia), it was decided that the BEST along with CESAER and SEFI should deploy a network of "Higher Engineering Education for Europe» (H3E) under the SOCRATES EU program. This network was officially created in September 1996 to influence the future of technical education. This made H3E the first network in which students’ participation was equal with others’.

At the XV General Assembly in Belgium BEST started cooperation with the German student organizations, united by Studenteninitiative eV, by this recognizing the activities of each of the parties and creating a framework for future relations. Since 2002, BEST has also been working with the Canadian Federation of Students of Technical Universities (CFES)