VUM is the legal successor of International University College, which was founded in 1999 and converted into a university of applied sciences type of HEI in May 2015. VUM is a private business school with approx. 800 students, over 25% of them being international and coming from more than 40 countries around the world. VUM is specialised in social sciences and offers undergraduate and master programmes in International Business and Management, Business Administration, Software Engineering, Business Information Systems and Tourism and Hospitality. At VUM, all study programmes are fully delivered in English and lead to the award of double degrees offered in collaboration with various universities in the EU and beyond. Over the last 10 years, VUM has embraced internationalisation as a horizontal policy underpinning all institutional activities and domains. VUM has an extensive and sophisticated network of active academic partners in over 60 countries on five continents incl. Asia. For the last four years, VUM has been among the largest beneficiaries of the Erasmus+ International Credit Mobility programme (ICM) in Bulgaria. Since ICM launch in 2015, in the framework of five consecutive projects, VUM has facilitated over 450 inbound student and staff mobilities from more than 40 universities in 25 countries worldwide. A large majority of the Partner Country HEIs involved in VUM ICM projects are long-term partners the university has collaborated with in the framework of various capacity building aimed projects. These include, inter alia, the Leading and Managing Change in Higher Education (La MANCHE) Tempus IV project (530621), as well as the Building Entrepreneurial Ecosystems to Enhance Higher Education Value-Added for Better Graduate Employability (BEEHIVE) currently ongoing Erasmus+ CBHE project (573936), both coordinated by VUM. The long-term efforts and commitment of VUM to in-depth internationalisation of the university’s curriculum, campus and community have been also internationally recognised and validated. In 2019, for a third year in a row U-Multirank placed VUM among the best 25 performers worldwide in terms of student mobility.

Christina Armutlieva is Director of International Cooperation and institutional Erasmus+ Coordinator at VUM. She holds an M.A. in Hungarian Language and Literature and Finno-Ugrian Linguistics. Prior to starting working for VUM, for 6 years Christina had worked as lecturer in the fields of linguistics at her alma mater the University of Debrecen, Hungary. Her research interests include minority language rights and policies in Scandinavia with concentration on Saami languages, as well as Finno-Ugrian minority languages’ political status and revitalisation processes in Russia. She joined the team of VUM in 2008 and since then she has been coordinating the academic mobility projects and the International Cooperation Department activities at VUM. Currently, she is in charge of various Erasmus+ ICM projects  facilitating large number of inbound student and staff mobilities from more than 40 universities in 25 countries worldwide. Christina is also Project Coordinator of the ongoing Erasmus+ CBHE BEEHIVE project and coordinated earlier the La MANCHE Tempus IV project (2012-2015).