Marta: "We don’t ask them their name, their qualifications or where they live, but questions that enable them to find out interests they have in common before they meet"

M: When I was in final year at secondary school I realised that neither I nor my classmates knew what we wanted to do: what we were passionate about, what jobs were related to our interests, or how to get them. I thought maybe if we tried them first we’d know what we’d like to do best.

M: The first thing I did was to look for someone who could help me. We formed a team of two and we contacted an association of businesspeople in our town, in the county of La Llitera, in Huesca province. Then we contacted secondary schools and students in the area. We did little pilot tests with students in final year of compulsory education and post-compulsory secondary school, and finally we did the definitive test, with several secondary schools and the Llitera Employers’ Association, in which each student spent a day with a professional in a company. At that point we saw that the project could go ahead. Then the team was joined by a programmer who helped us to develop the website. At that moment we considered the idea of creating an application, but in the end we decided that first we needed the idea to take shape.

I: At the beginning we worked with people close to us. It was a very small world, very different from what we’ve found in Barcelona. When we arrived here at Pompeu Fabra University we decided to centre the project on its students because they were closest at hand. So now we focus on UPF students. In principle, we want to leave it as a project for the University, but we don’t rule out expanding it in the future.

Iris: There was a time when we weighed up the idea of making it profitable. But we decided that that wasn’t our main purpose

I: In a way, launching an altruistic project is liberating. We do it because we want to, and because we love what we do. We’re confident that as long as we see that the project continues to motivate us and we continue to learn from it and have fun, and we have time to do it, we’ll carry on. But if at some point we see that we have other priorities that move us more, maybe the project will fade into the background. It’s all very free, and while we’re working along these lines we’ll continue.

M: In several projects I’ve been involved with, I’ve realised how difficult it is to be a female entrepreneur. I came up against one very significant example of this once at a talk. The speakers talked to members of the audience after the talk; there were three boys and me. One of the speakers was a man who worked in a consultancy firm and also managed agricultural startups. My father’s a farmer, and I’m very interested in the subject. In the course of the conversation he only looked at the boys, as if I didn’t exist. At one moment in the conversation he was talking about a particular agricultural startup and he couldn’t remember its name. I jogged his memory, and he looked at me with surprise; it felt like he was thinking: “what do you know about that?”

Marta: In several projects I’ve been involved with, I’ve realised how difficult it is to be a female entrepreneur

M: I was really shocked, because I was experiencing a situation which, although I’d heard about, I didn’t think I’d ever find myself in. I felt like my image was that of a woman who was carrying out an entrepreneurial project but actually had no idea about anything. After that I decided to push ahead with much more personality. I realised how difficult my position was, but being aware of these difficulties also gave me strength to carry on.

I: We both took part in the Ship2B programme, a social and educational entrepreneurship programme. It was during that experience that we started working together. As a result of that, we found out what we really wanted to do. Before, we weren’t at all sure about what direction to take. We were very easily influenced by other people’s ideas; we lacked personality. Now we do what we think is best for the project; we’re much more faithful to ourselves.

Marta: "my imagination is offset by Iris dose of reality. You could say I’m the one with the ideas and she’s the one with her feet on the ground."

M: Well, I don’t know if it’s a matter of personal maturity, the atmosphere or the people around us, but now is when the project is working best. I look back and I see that it was all very adolescent then. When I was 18 I let myself be influenced a lot by outside people. Now I think we have different personalities and skills that complement each other very well. Since Iris and I have been working together it’s been working better than ever: we’ve learnt plenty from everything we’ve done and we’ve listened carefully to the people we’ve met, but always analysing with our own criterion whether their advice was good for us or not.

M: Our plans for the future are basically, in addition to focusing on contacts between students and companies, also to do so in experiences within NGOs and social organisations, because we think they should stop being seen as activities aside from the university and employment. We want to make it visible that they can also be a possible career.

Iris: "We want to focus on those degrees in which it’s more difficult to see what career prospects there are in the social field"

M: No. We realised that the project had to go at our pace, not us at the pace of the project. For example, if we’re in an exam period and we haven’t got time, we stop. We don’t follow a schedule. At the beginning of term we do have meetings at weekends, but it’s all very variable.

M: Yes, on 1 March we held an event at UPF – with the support of the dean’s office of the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting – that was very special for both of us. It enabled us to make our work visible. Two professionals from the company ULG (United Language Group) came to talk to the students and they simulated an experience organised by Appasióname. In addition, we organised other group activities to help them get to know themselves and the rest of the participants better.

We’d like to organise more activities like the talk we did on 1 March. But to do that we need institutional support.

I: It’s difficult to develop a project like ours, which belongs to the social field, in today’s world, which is largely based on new technologies. Most social science students don’t have the know-how we need to expand our initiatives and get them across to a large number of people. I think social science students should also have training based on these objectives of project expansion and entrepreneurship.