lessons learned from 2023

a thank you

 

Anja, the main host of the MLSS 2024, writes:

Attending the MLSS 2022 as a participant was a career-changing experience for me. At the same time, I saw a number of summer school elements that had the potential to become even better. At the start of my journey as an organiser in the beginning of 2023 I had first-hand participant experience of what worked and what did not. My ideas were complemented by the invaluable feedback from other participants, bringing up a variety of different perspectives in addition to the rich experience of the existing organising team.
With this exhaustive knowledge we brought the MLSS 2023 to life. 

With lots of attention to details it was very gratifying to see how much of the lessons learned from our MLSS 2022 we carefully weaved into the summer school experience and made come to life. Naturally, this change of my own role from a participant to an organiser also meant experiencing the next iteration of the summer school from a different angle. The only way to find out if our changes brought our participants more joy, possibilities for personal and professional growth and long-lasting connections was by collecting their feedback. Whether via conversations or feedback forms, we appreciated hearing and reading all your thoughts and ideas on what went well and what elements can be evolved further.

Receiving the feedback instead of giving it was a scary experience, leaving me vulnerable. I was amazed by the amount and quality of feedback we received and the investment of time and mental energy that was put into communicating it to us. When reading the daily self-reflections about their experience during their summer school day, I realised that e.g. by being open and sharing their emotions our participants were showcasing their trust in us.

I cannot express how much I value all the input we received from the MLSS ’23 participants. It allows us to celebrate the summer school features we and our partners exceled in meticulously crafting as well as to be accountable for our mistakes and further evolve our summer school for our 2024 iteration.

One important aspect of advancing our summer school programme is to consciously subtract elements in addition to adding them. Research shows that this process is often counterintuitive, which is why we are intentional about emphasising it and its outcomes.

I cannot wait to see this year’s edition of our MLSS come to life and read your thoughts, feelings and reflections upon experiencing it!

 

moving forward

we are continuing ...

The diversity, breadth and depth of our lecturers

Dear reader, in this section we will leave you alone with these quotes for a moment:

“One of the highlights of the program was the outstanding faculty comprising senior executives, industry leaders, and top researchers from prestigious institutions like Emory, ETH Zurich, Cambridge, and leading pharmaceutical companies like Roche, Bayer, Biogen, and Novartis, among other” - Olga Brovkina, participant via LinkedIn

“Meeting so many remarkable people in such a short period felt like using a cheat code in a video game!” - Vlad Palichenka, participant via LinkedIn

Our application form

Our application form was praised as being accessible, inclusive, detailed and well-organised.

Based on the suggestion of one applicant to add a fun question we included a question about your sources of inspiration. We hope that this small gesture will lead to you pressing the submit button feeling energised.

“I take pleasure in stating that I have found completing this application form to be a gratifying experience, particularly with regard to the motivation section, as it has allowed me to delve deeply into my future aspirations and envisage myself in my future career path.” - anonymous applicant, application form

The interactive nature of our sessions

Creating space for questions lead to more than 300 questions asked during a single week. We are especially proud of the quality of the questions which was praised by our lecturers. We are excited to hear yours in just a few months!

“What impressed me the most about the Bumblekite summer school, is the active crowd of participants. They engage in meaningful discussion and don't settle with the obvious answer. By digging deeper and deeper, they challenge the speakers and the audience to be specific and to be brave in voicing opinions. A really refreshing community.” - Thomas Huggler, managing director, University Hospital Balgrist, lecturer

Our social programme

We were delighted to hear a lot of positive feedback for the social programme. Our participants could choose between a hike to Uetliberg and a guided city tour. We also spent an evening on a rooftop in the heart of Zurich and got to know the ETH main building, where the summer school was taking place, through a tour of its own.

We are especially proud of the positive feedback considering it was one of the key points we changed based on our lessons learned from 2022, when Covid did not permit us to design a rich social programme. We are planning a similar social programme for this year’s iteration. Inspired by Judy, who turned her office hours into a dinner, we plan to organise dinner groups led by our partners and lecturers. Some will be a part of the office hours.

“I was trying to be efficient and I was feeling hungry when suggesting having a group dinner instead of classical office hours. Additionally, this aligned with my belief of village mentoring, in which other people can help generate answers when someone asks a question you are afraid of.”  - Judy Gichoya, associate professor, Emory University, lecturer

The lunch groups

We formed groups for the lunch break consisting of 4-5 participants for every day of the summer school based on a different theme, e.g. mixing participants belonging to different career stages. We aimed to provide a structure for participants that might find it challenging to approach new people and allow for them to have a mechanism by which they continuously spend quality time with new people throughout the week. We also provided the groups with one question to start the conversations with. While the overall feedback was very positive there was also a wish to socialise more independently.

This year we will therefore suggest lunch groups for 3 out of the 5 days of the summer school.

“What I enjoyed most was meeting lots of new people (including the organisers). The idea of setting up groups for the meals was great and allowed me to make a lot of very interesting acquaintances.” - anonymous attendee, post-MLSS feedback

A larger selection of coffee and lunch venues

In 2022 queues during the coffee breaks lead to less socialising between the participants. In 2023 we strengthened our partnership with Klara's Kitchen and SV group (Mensa Polyterasse and Einstein&Zweistein). The increased number of venues resulted in minimised waiting times.

We aim to continue our partnership with the venues to ensure the participants have a relaxing break with opportunities to form meaningful connections with other participants and our lecturers.

Our sustainability efforts

Sustainability is an important criteria during our event planning. To us this means e.g. encouraging participants to use public transportation and creating a partnership with floral-lokal, allowing us to decorate the lecture hall with seasonal and local flowers. To compensate for the emissions caused by the travel to and from the summer school we started to gather the data necessary to make the emission estimates. As we finalise our 2023 efforts, we will continue to develop our endeavours in this space.

Having learnt from the previous iteration we will amplify our efforts by gathering more information necessary to estimate and lower our environmental impact this and the following years.

Guidance for the organisation of your accommodation

We continued our partnership with Hotel Placid and created a partnership with Oldtown Hostel Otter in the heart of Zurich in 2023. Both offered a reduced fee for the stay of our participants.

Based on the amount of participants who benefited from these partnerships, we hope to deepen our relationships with our accommodation partners this year.

Our application guidance

Last year, Romana Burgess, the winner of our application award ‘22, created an application guidance to ensure that every potential applicant feels confident when commencing our application process. It became one of our most visited pages last year.

We teamed up with our ‘23 winner Carolina Picarra, to provide the next iteration of ourapplication guidance page.

“I liked the format, especially the guidelines on how to write the cover letter and the specific questions to answer.” - anonymous applicant via the application form

Bumblekite Thank You cards

Expressing gratitude is one of our central community values. The success of our summer school would not be possible without many of our invaluable partners, e.g. the ETH staff providing us with logistics assistance on the ground before and throughout the event and Frenci Sanna, our brand designer, one of the core artistic masterminds behind the Bumblekite brand. Unlike our lecturers, most of them do not directly interact with you. In ‘23 we asked our participants to write a few words on our Thank you cards for our partners as a sign of our deep appreciation for them. The reactions were overwhelmingly positive.

This year we will be providing bigger Thank you cards to allow more space for all the positive interactions. While last year the signing of the cards took place during the breaks or at the beginning of the leadership Q&A conversations, this summer we will carve out dedicated time to allow for the writing process to become a treasured ritual that has our undivided attention as we engage in it.

“I'm writing to say a massive THANK YOU for sending me the sweetest surprise ever - that appreciation letter from the ML Summer School! It was totally unexpected, and I must admit, I'm absolutely thrilled!

It's awesome to think that even though I couldn't be there physically, a piece of my work found its way to Zurich and became a part of something so special. Thank you for acknowledging my efforts; it truly means a lot to me.” - Vedant Joshi, contributor to the tutorial delivered by Judy Gichoya

 

we have changed ...

The first day at our summer school venue

Some of our participants experienced the first day as stressful due to the unfamiliar location and the tight schedule, based on their self-reflections. This year, instead of having the ETH tour in the middle of the week, we will have the tour on Monday to allow the participants to become more familiar with the location which we will traverse throughout our summer school week. Additionally, we will guide the participants to the coffee and lunch venues on the first day. We will also increase the number of signs leading towards the lecture room.

The break schedule

For many participants the schedule did not allow for enough breaks and rest during the summer school. We will therefore increase the length of the breaks to also allow for more of unscheduled informal conversations with the lecturers after their lecture and limit the duration of the leadership conversations to 1 hour slots.

“Daily schedule was too long.” - anonymous attendee, post-MLSS feedback

The certificates

Last year, we provided certificates of attendance to allow participants to apply for ECTS from their home university.

Going forward certificates will only be provided to participants attending all sessions on time and adhering to our community guidelines.

The voting for our best team player award

We introduced tutorial pairings and the best team player award in 2023, to honour a participant who dedicated themselves and their valuable summer school time to helping others, especially during the tutorials. Voting for the best team player in the post-MLSS feedback form led to a small number of suggestions, therefore we were not able to give the award last year.

This year, the voting will take place on Friday during one of the last summer school sessions. This will also allow us to subsequently celebrate the achievements of this individual all together, in person.

Bumblekite research

In addition to the points listed above last year, inspired and motivated by the feedback we collected from our participants, we kicked off a companion project to our summer school: Bumblekite research. You can read more about it on our research page.

the data informing our changes

We consciously approach our self-evaluation process in a data-driven manner, taking into account the experiences of participants, lecturers and the Bumblekite team in 2023.

Our data includes:

  • first-day-MLSS questionnaires to gather everything we can change for the rest of the summer school,

  • self-reflections to give the participants space to think about their insights and experiences of the day,

  • post-MLSS questionnaires and

  • interviews to capture detailed feedback after the impressions of the summer school have settled.  

The data in numbers: 40 first-day-MLSS questionnaires (18 anonymous), 160 completed daily reflections during the summer school (58 anonymous), 8 post-MLSS questionnaires (5 anonymous), 3 post-MLSS interviews and reflections from 3 Bumblekite team members. Additionally, we gathered feedback from the lecturers via a lecturer satisfaction form (9 answers) and unstructured conversations. 

Compared to 2022 we received 80% more written feedback, i.e. first-day-MLSS questionnaires, daily reflections and post-MLSS questionnaires.