It was September of 2018. I had just started my freshman year in uni in Holland.

In the Netherlands, Dutch students have this kind of travel reimbursement to travel by train or any public transport for free.

However, international students, or even European ones like me, are not eligible for this. 

One day my friends and I were talking about this issue. 

One of them mentioned a competition organized by the European Union in which they give away free passes to travel for free by train around Europe for 18 years old.

We agreed it was a great idea, but we kept talking about other stuff and forgot about that. 

That afternoon, for some reason, that competition came back to my mind, and I took my laptop and decided to look into it. 

It seemed like a great opportunity. You only had to answer several questions to apply for it. 

I told my friends about it, but they didn’t seem to be too interested. 

I applied for it. After doing so, I told my friends I had applied for it and asked them if they wanted to do it. Only one of them replied. He told me he tried to do it, but he couldn’t because he was from Norway, and he wasn’t eligible to apply because Norway is not in the EU. 

Two months after applying, I had completely forgotten about it when I suddenly received an email congratulating me for winning a free pass. 

This pass consisted of an “interrail ticket” used in any trains in Europe to travel for free within a month. A pass like this is worth 250 euros if you wanted to purchase it on your own. 

I remember telling my friends I had won and they were so surprised and started asking me… How did you do it? Why do you always win these kinds of competitions?... 

I mean, the answer was pretty obvious, I reminded them several times to apply for it, and they didn’t. I win a lot of online competitions because I apply for all of them. 

So as a small piece of advice, if you see something interesting, whether it’s online or not, apply for it. It’ll take 5 minutes, and you never know…

PS: this is the link for the competition. Feel free to check it out!