Summer School Review

Letzte Woche war ich das erste Mal auf einer europäischen PhD Summer School. Um ein bißchen in Übung zu bleiben, reflektiere ich darüber im Folgenden in Englisch.

Last weeks JESS TEL summer school was a great networking experience for me. Having recently narrowed down my PhD-topic, I had and still have many chances to discuss my research goals and questions and to compare them to those of the other participants. I highly recommend other PhD students to participate in an event like this early during their studies to get an overview about current research issues in Europe and even more important to get to know the interesting and fascinating people behind the research topics. The best time for visiting a summer school is probably after you have decided about your research questions and written your first proposal.

But, what is a summer school? To be honest, I did not really know when I spontaniously applied. One of my friends had suggested to do so (thanks Zina, by the way 😉 ), and I’m happy I trusted her good advice. According to Wikipedias first result  ‚Summer School‚ is a movie that I haven’t seen yet. I couldn’t find a good definition of ‚PhD summer school‘ during my first Google-search. Although there is another Wikipedia definition findable. But I will cite this further down.

Looking back at last week impressions I can define:  a PhD Summer School is a one-week-get-together of young researchers and more experienced lecturers for several days to share knowledge, get to know each other, discuss, communicate, network and maybe even collaborate in the future. Against the background of my definition the JESS TEL summer school 2009 was successful. But still there have been several complaints of students and some of the lecturers.

Even though the summer schools title „Emancipated Learner“ suggested maybe a barcamp format, the strict program did not schedule much time for active attendance of PhD students. Another popular complaint was the poor internet connection which didn’t even allow to send e-mails or to twitter during the lectures. Graham Attwall published a list of all the complaints in his blog. I also wasn’t amused of this situation all the time (but sometimes 🙂 ). But… would we have had the chance to demonstrate that we are emancipated learners without being caged into a dusty wireless hotel in the slovakian mountains? (–> In the middle of the week the students arranged a barcamp-like get-together after dinner.)

„Summer school (or summer university) is a school, or a program generally sponsored by a school or a school district, that teaches students during the summer vacation.“

defines Wikipedia. And furthermore:

„In academia the term can also refer to a type of conference. Typically, established academics will give presentations on advanced topics in a field to postgraduate students.“

This was also very true for telss09. Analysing the comments of the students there should be a new type of summer school which could be called a PhD summer barcamp (a student generated summer school)… What do you think about that?