Advice if not pre-selected

I received some private questions on that, but I guess it's better to write on the general forum so that everybody can see it.

If you are not preselected (I hope it's not the case): contact the Traineeships Office and ask for your points! They will tell you where you did well and where not - this way next time you can send a better application and hopefully get preselected.

Aneena thank you so much for all this informations! It is the first time I am applying, and I must say without this forum I would be quite lost!
Once again, thank you!

Hello. I am one of the unfortunates who didn’t even get preselected, thus after I got the rejection email I wrote to the TO to ask for my points and they just told me that my score was 5 points below the threshold. Now my question is: what does it mean exactly, was I even close or is it really bad?

I was also not pre-selected...
they told me I was 1 point below the required threshold, although they do not tell what the threshold is.
That sounds like so closely missing out, but then again with 14.000 applicants its probably 1000 people per point as the total amount of points you can get is 40....

I read that this is how the pre selection commitees put together the points:
"Pre-selection is the next stage of the qualification process. The Traineeships Office sets up the pre-selection committee composed of the European Commission’s officials. Every application is assessed separately by two evaluators who attribute points, if the candidate meets the specific criteria, according to the following scale:

education – from 0 to 6 points;
justification (e.g. selection of the appropriate DG adjusted to the personal profile and its justification presentation) – from 0 to 4 points;
additional competence (studies abroad, relevant professional experience, language skills, presentation of the portfolio) - from 0 to 6 points.
Points assigned by every evaluator are added up. Next, the candidates are classified according to their nationality and ranked according to the achieved score.

Pre-selected candidates are put in the database of the EC (Blue Book), and their numbers are published on the website (at the end of November for the summer session or in the middle of May for the winter session)."

http://kariera.sgh.waw.pl/articles/job-search/jak-starac-sie-o-staze-w-unii-europejskiej-2013-poradnik-praktyczny?cl=en&set_language=en