Retreat inspires iImmune students

On a beau­tiful late sum­mer morn­ing, stu­dents and lectur­ers of the Elite Grad­uate Pro­gram „Integrated Immunology“ met in the con­fer­ence center of the Fraunhofer Re­search Cam­pus in the mid­dle of the Fran­conian Swit­zer­land for a 2-day re­treat. They were partic­ularly look­ing for­ward to a re­fresh­ing com­bi­nation of inter­esting scien­tific lec­tures, excit­ing dis­cussions and the very fruit­ful evalu­ation of the first year of study, which was also an­chored in the meet­ing pro­gram.

Be­sides the 26 stu­dents and 12 lectur­ers of the pro­gram, it was a great honor to wel­come the exter­nal scien­tific advi­sory board. After Prof. Claris­sa Prazeres da Costa (Mu­nich), Dr. Ulf Grawunder (Ba­sel), Prof. Simon Fil­latreau (Paris) and Prof. Lill Mar­tens-son-Bopp (Gothenburg) had intro­duced them­selves and their own excit­ing re­search areas, the stu­dents curi­ously used the up­com­ing round of ques­tions to dis­cuss their career and sci­ence. Im­muno­logical knowledge from basic re­search and trans­lation­al ap­proaches in immu­nology was al­ready taught to the stu­dents in their first year of study.

A short hiking tour to­gether pre­pared all partic­ipants for the up­com­ing dis­cussion rounds to evalu­ate the pro­gram. These first took place in the con­text of a re­view of the first aca­demic year by the speak­er of the pro­gram, Prof. Dr. Falk Nim­mer­jahn, in the entire ple­num. Af­ter­wards, the advi­sory board with­drew with the stu­dents for dis­cussions in small­er groups, and in the end, out of much praise and the few points of criti­cism, all to­gether devel­oped sug­ges­tions for im­provement that could be per­fectly im­ple­ment­ed into the pro­gram for the next year.

Within other parts of the pro­gram, the stu­dents re­ported on the organ­ization of their planned in­tern­ships abroad and the corre­spond­ing appli­cati­ons for schol­ar­ships. Dur­ing the breaks, at meals and in the even­ing, the stu­dents also dis­cussed scien­tific topics. Many of the young scien­tists took the oppor­tunity to inten­sively dis­cuss their fo­cused re­search fields with the lectur­ers and thus to choose an excit­ing topic for their up-com­ing Master the­sis.

In the end, every­one looked back enthu­siasti­cally on a very fruit­ful meet­ing, which en­couraged the stu­dents to start their intern­ships abroad and moti­vated the lectur­ers for the start of the new aca­demic year with a new cohort of stu­dents.

Text: Elite Graduate Program "Integrated Immunology"