The LBG Uppsala saga began in year of 1999, when two students at Uppsala university who had been inspired by a group of BESTies in Stockholm, decided to send in their own application to start a local group in Uppsala. When they went to their first event as observers to the general assembly in Lissabon they had already mobilized a little gathering of Uppsala students who had the interest in making friends with other European students. Their first step as a group was to organize an Uppsala weekend as an activity for BEST Stockholms summer course participants, with great sucess of course, and the group was on the go! The preparations for the next general assembly, GA 2000 in Stockholm started and our group did its part by arranging trainings for the organizers, by this time they also upgraded their status from observers to baby members at presidents meeting in Chania. This was the place where they first experienced what a funny word Uppsala is to non swedes.
When GA in Stockholm was over it was time for BEST Uppsala to take the next step and do something bigger on their own – the first summer course was held. Without the wisdom and experience that has been collected ever since, this first course turned out to be a lot about improvising, and cooking… and in the end the organizers had learned a lot about how to plan the budget more wisely for following years. The course was another important milestone for the members of the Uppsala group. After becoming a full member in GA 2000 in Budapest, BEST Uppsala organized a summer course every year, overcoming problems with a continuous lack of human resources. The courses were mostly focusing on renewable energies, a subject that is still in these days making Uppsala’s courses among the most popular. More than once, our BEST group has been number 1 on the list of number of applications received.
Eventually the group grew a little bigger and became a separate legal entity, independent from the student union. This made certain management and accounting activities easier to perform. The group had now started to arrange cultural exchanges. In year 2003 BEST Uppsala organized its first regional meeting and a few years later – a board meeting (for the international board in 2005). Getting closer to present time, membership has now soared, as more and more Swedish students have discovered the beauty and charm of the BEST spirit.
At a nordic regional event in 2008 an old tradition started to receive some new attention, when BESTies from Uppsala thought it started to feel a bit old to be thought of as the BEST group of a city with a funny name (that you can make funny songs out of) decided to do something different. The Uppsala dance was already there, as a part of the Uppsala engineer students identity, all it needed was some devoted dancers of the BEST group to bring it with them to internal events and start sharing this “modern traditional” dance, which was lately dubbed as “Uppsala dance”. It reached its pinnacle in GA 2009, Budapest, where Nordic Besties trained by BEST Uppsala performed the dance and helped spreading the Uppsala engineer student culture to the rest of Europe.