Project Year

What better location for an innovative laboratory for liberal arts than a historic city that has reinvented itself several times? Berlin provides an ideal setting for ECLA’s small, international academic community.

In the frame of European College of Liberal Arts’s Berlin programme, students and faculty come together to explore Berlin’s cultural heritage and continued development. All students receive museum cards and transportation passes for the academic year, and may attend selected dance performances, classical concerts, lectures, plays and Berlinale films at subsidized prices. Nights out in Berlin often end with conversations in a café.

ECLA is a 20-minute tram ride away from Berlin Mitte, as well as from Prenzlauer Berg, one of the trendiest districts in the former East Berlin. A ten-minute tram ride or seven-minute bicycle ride brings students from campus to the U-Bahn station Pankow, which links ECLA by underground and city trains to all parts of the city.

European College of Liberal Arts is a residential college with a green campus located in Pankow-Niederschönhausen, the northern part of Berlin. Most of ECLA’s buildings were built in the 70s and formerly belonged to the embassies of several countries in the GDDR (including Cuba, Egypt, and Nigeria).

The houses have been recently renovated. Student houses are equipped with all the necessary facilities: there is a kitchen, a laundry room, a lounge and a computer lab in each of the dorms. ECLA’s library and a music room are just across the street. In fact, everything on campus is within walking distance. In ECLA’s cafeteria around the corner students are provided with three meals a day by a catering company.

ECLA’s campus is a space for ongoing discussion, which continues oftentimes outside of the classroom. Different activities, happening also in the dorms (for example, poetry nights or late night talks) strengthen the sense of a learning community.

Students in their first two years of study share a room with a fellow-student, which facilitates the cultural exchange between students from different countries. Advanced students, especially those working on an individual project, get a single room.