19 December 2025 / Faculty Club

Report by Barbara Gede

We had been planning it for a long time (for sure for the tenth or fifteenth anniversary), but it finally happened on the twentieth: at the end of 2025, a few days before Christmas, we finally managed to organize a class reunion for the first international studies (not relations!) students in the five-year programme who started at the University of Economics in 2000 and graduated in 2005.

We started with about eighty students, the well-known „N1” and „N2” groups, and five years later, in 2005, nearly fifty of us received our diplomas. I think that as the first class of the five-year International Studies programme, we always had a slight feeling of self-importance: not only were we the first, but we were also few in number compared to the following years, a carefully selected group from all over the country. Our teachers who attended the reunion did not refute this feeling: besides the fact that it was great to see each other again, it was also wonderful that several of our beloved and memorable former teachers accepted our invitation (László Csicsmann, Zoltán Gálik, László Kiss J., Bernadett Lehoczki, Beáta Paragi, Zoltán Sz. Bíró, Anita Szűcs), and our favorite Zsuzsa Rátkai from student administration also came — it was great to reminisce about some shared memories together.

Of course, as first-year students of a new programme, we were a bit like guinea pigs, but I don’t think many of us regret embarking on this journey: for many of us, these five years spent together were a truly defining and formative period, which we look back on fondly, and many of us still cherish the genuine friendships we made during that time. Many of us have built international careers, becoming diplomats or employees of EU and international organizations, as many of us had planned back then, but the pervasive „multidisciplinarity” has also had an impact: many have found their place in positions related to finance, security policy, internal security, legal protection, political science, communication, or even statistics. A significant part of the group lives abroad, from New York to Luxembourg and Brussels, from Rabat to Berlin or Cali, we are everywhere today.

During the evening, everyone had a few minutes to share where they started, where they are now, and what Fukuyama or Kissinger meant to them back then. In addition to the always expected straight career paths, there were interesting changes and surprises. Despite the end-of-year rush and Christmas, quite a few of us got together: nearly forty, with several more joining online from further afield.

It was nice to be IR students again for a while, to recognize in the familiar and unfamiliar adult faces the kids we once were. And it was especially nice to meet in the old university building at

Fővám square—thanks to the Alumni Club and the Department of International Relations for their help with this. I think that after the meeting, many of us felt that it would be a shame to wait another 20 years for this; we promised ourselves that we wouldn’t wait that long for the next one—let’s hope so!