Go back to overview

The welcome week: first common events

Dur­ing the first week of the se­mes­ter the new stu­dents meet each other for the first time and had some social and in­form­ative events. The week ended with a hik­ing tour in the upper Ba­varian mountains.

Introduction of institutions and lectures

In the first two days the students of the Elite Graduate Program "Biomedical Neuroscience" got in­for­mation about most of the par­tici­pating insti­tu­tions. Lec­tures from dif­ferent groups were talk­ing about their scien­tific pro­jects. Dur­ing these presenta­tions the stu­dents met some of the lec­tures from dif­ferent insti­tu­tions and had first in­sights into the scien­tific work they per­formed. This in­for­mation is very help­ful for the stu­dents since later, they have to choose sci­en­tific groups for their lab in­tern­ships based on their per­sonal scien­tific inter­ests. For stu­dents that had not yet fo­cused on spe­cific topics the presenta­tions given by the lec­tures where help­ful to spark inter­est in vari­ous fields of the neu­rosci­ence re­search.

Next steps after the master´s degree

This year the career day was fo­cused on the topic “aca­demic ca­reers”. For this event the stu­dents from the cur­rent as well as from the pre­vious co­hort were invit­ed. The latter ones are in the sec­ond year of the pro­gram and are close to the deci­sion about their future career path. The day start­ed with an intro­duc­tion to the dif­ferent PhD pro­grams in natu­ral sci­ences at the Mu­nich uni­versi­ties by the re­spec­tive coor­dina­tors and speakers. The fur­ther se­quence fol­lowed the steps of a typi­cal aca­demic ca­reer: first two PhD stu­dents, Ms. Katja Saal­baum and Mr. Tom Schwerd-Kleine, both are grad­uates of the Elite Mas­ter Pro­gram Bio­medi­cal Neu­rosci­ence intro­duced them­selves. They re­port­ed their expe­rienc­es in find­ing and se­lecting their PhD posi­tions. After that a group leader and two young pro­fes­sors pre­sent­ed their indi­vidual career paths. The career day ended with a forum dis­cussion be­tween the stu­dents and the pro­fes­sors. In this dis­cussion it was very im­portant for the stu­dents to hear what is im­portant for a suc­cess­ful appli­cation for a PhD posi­tion.

Visit from the Imperial College in London

The so-called “chemical kitch­en” pro­ject was de­veloped at the Impe­rial Col­lege in Lon­don to teach basic labor­atory tech­niques like exact scal­ing or pro­tein pre­cipi­ta­tion. Such tech­niques are also im­portant in cook­ing. An­other anal­ogy of basic labor­atory tech­niques and cook­ing is the need to fol­low pre­cisely given in­struc­tions. To per­form this event, we invit­ed our coop­era­tion part­ner Mr. Jacub Radzikow­ski, one of the founders of “chemical kitch­en” to Mu­nich. In a rented loca­tion the stu­dents pro­duced amongst other dishes spa­ghetti made from Agar and a cheese cake. On the next day we had a hy­brid event con­duct­ed via zoom by Mr. Jozef Youssef in Lon­don. It was an inter­active event called “kitchen theo­ry”. Fol­low­ing his ex­plana­tions and prac­tical in­struc­tions the stu­dents had a lot of mul­tisen­sory expe­rienc­es.

Text: Helmuth Adelsberger, Elite Graduate Program "Biomedical Neuroscience"