In biology there are four such meetings per year, two of which deal with general topics of students politics and their educational situation (called "Bundes-Fachschaften-Tagung" or cryptically abbreviated as "BuFaTa"), while the other two put their focus on the ecological and genetic aspects of biology, respectively ("Ökotagung" and "Gentech-Tagung").

These meetings are hosted by students representative organizations (or "Fachschaften" in German) by a rotational principle, and the venue usually is located in the town of the hosting Fachschafts university or nearby.

On the BuFaTa in Karlsruhe from 25.04. - 28.04.96 the idea arose to transform this practice of regular meetings of student representatives to a higher level and try to set up a similar thing in a european context.

Since the countries of Europe are becoming more and more interconnected in respects of politics, economy and culture, the students will also have to re-orientate and adopt themselves to this new environment, especially regarding the prospects of studying or searching in a european country other than their own. Paying attention to this development we found that contact among students representatives in order to exchange information and making it easier for students to "find their place" is more important than ever.

Keeping this in mind and knowing that in other degree studies such as geography the attempts to organize european meetings already exist we wondered if it was possible that such a thing could be set up for biology as well, just taking the BuFaTa concept and modifying it to a larger scale.

Many things had to be taken into account before even starting to work on the program itself, such as finding an appropriate venue for the meeting, raising money or even giving the child a name. Since then a permanently working group of students from different German universities has been established concerned organizing the meeting during the subsequent BuFaTas as well as in the time in between.

Since nobody of us ever was involved in setting up a meeting of that scale (everybody participated in the organization of a BuFaTa, however, and thus being able to utilize these experiences) we ourselves are as eager and curious about the outcome of SymBioSE as anybody else coming to Berlin in August might be.