We run a semester system and would like to plan for a full semester or a whole academic year. So knowing who comes out when is important for us,… but if they have fit it in their own personal time back home, it does not always work well for us. So we find sometimes we are trying to adjust things here to accommodate them.

I would say that we prefer the formal partnerships because we can apply some control on how things work and when we have some structure in terms of objectives, then it is possible to evaluate and say this has worked well and this hasn’t.

I think as an institution sometimes we give this impression that we are wandering in the dark and we need someone to just tell us what we need, what we want. That is a failing on our part. We need to have clarity in ourselves, what we need….So the first meeting should leave them with the clear impression that, as an institution, we have our own strategic objectives…We would like certain kinds of help and there is some kind of help we don’t want now….Second we need to assert ourselves, so that people do not sort of stampede us into doing something we don’t want.

If it’s possible to exchange faculty between the two institutions, not always one way, but both ways, so that we learn from each other.