lessons learned from 2024

Our familiar Bumblekite magic

During the previous years we have received positive feedback about the diversity, breadth and depth of our lecturers lineup and the interactive nature of our sessions. We will keep these elements the same and leave you with these quotes for a moment:

Our application form

With the number of our applications steadily increasing, we are delighted that our application form is continuously described as inclusive and inspiring.

In the previous iteration, we added a question about giving (back) to an individual or a community. At the heart of this question is in no way a ranking of the act itself between the applicants. Instead, the answer to this question gives us a valuable insight into your mindset and how you view your role as a member of the communities you belong to.

Likewise, importantly, it sets the tone for our week together. If everyone engages in acts of giving during the week, this alone creates a uniquely differentiated experience for everyone in attendance, not only our participants, but also, equally importantly, all of our partners. We are looking forward to reading this year's applications, including the inspiring stories of your acts of giving.

Group get-togethers with the lecturers

In 2023, our participants spontaneously went for dinner with Judy Gichoya, our opening keynote lecturer. Both Judy and our participants were delighted by their experience. Inspired by their feedback, we added group food for thought gatherings with our Bumblekite lecturers as a regular part of our office hours programming segment.

In 2024, during dinners and a breakfast we curated, our participants were able to ask their questions at Hiltl, in a great, intimate atmosphere, which for some of them was a setting where their favourite Bumblekite moments took place. We will continue and expand this programming element in this year’s iteration.

Crafting the little things for the absolute best experience

Before the start of our Bumblekite week, many of our participants sent a short voice message introducing themselves and what they are most excited about about their upcoming week in Zürich. Meltem Salb, our videographer, edited dozens of individual messages into a single audio experience. By listening to it, we aimed to create a sense of familiarity and intimacy, similar to that we experience with e.g. our favourite podcast host(s).

To continue building upon this cozy feeling, Anja wrote individual welcome notes for each participant to ease and delight their start into the week. (Yes, it took a full day for her to do this, but it was one of the best investments we made last year.) To close the week, on Friday everyone had the opportunity to write a postcard for their future self, which we cannot wait to mail to our former participants this year, at the beginning of our Bumblekite 2025 experience.

Looking back at the week, the seemingly small elements and many others contributed much more to the experience than the sum of their pieces or the size of the gestures.

Voting for our outstanding collaboration award

We are excited to move this item from “we are changing in 2024” to “we are continuing in 2025”. This year, our participants voted for the person that supported them the most throughout their week in our last daily reflection form, leading to the majority of the participants casting their votes and us being able to announce the person with the most votes before the end of our week together.

We were also incredibly happy to celebrate Max and his contribution to the Bumblekite week in our LinkedIn post.

Generating meeting points between tutorial leaders and participants

Two of our Zürich-based tutorial leaders, Krishna and Pushpak , data scientists at Johnson & Johnson, attended our social programme on Monday. They used this opportunity to get to know our participants, including their expectations towards their tutorial and used this feedback to modify it.

While fully utilising their slightly unfair advantage ;) of delivering the last tutorial of the week, taking place on Friday, their tutorial ended up being regarded as exceptional by many of our participants. This year, we are looking to expand on the number of interactions between the tutorial leads, you and the rest of our participants ahead of their respective tutorials, inspired by Krishna and Pushpak's example.

Including the partners and family members of our lecturers and participants in our social programme

We noticed that many participants and lecturers travel with their families. We will continue to include them in our social programme to make them feel welcome into our community. This includes inviting them to our Monday evening gathering, where we come together to connect over our first impressions of the week, hike and the Zürich city tour.

For us, the Bumblekite programme has always been more than a machine learning summer school. From the start we looked to create a set of life moments many of you will hopefully look at with pride and happiness in many years to come. Your decision to share some of them during our week in Zürich with your family will never be a burden - always, simply, a great privilege.

Going forward, we are actively looking to expand our efforts in this area. You can always reach out to us with your suggestions.

Crafting thoughtful data-driven behavioural nudges

Our office hours are opportunities for conversations with our lecturers, either 1:1 or in a small group with other participants on the topics of your own choosing, for example your career trajectory, or the paper you are working on and other questions you are eager to explore in a more intimate setting. We craft these moments based on your preferences, with everyone being able to name up to three lecturers in the registration form you fill out a few weeks ahead of our week in Zürich.

When looking at the data in 2023, we noticed that 80% of our male participants put a male lecturer as their first choice while 60% of our female participants named a female lecturer at the top of their list. In 2024, we shared this data with our participants before asking them to submit their preference. This led to the following result: 57% of our male participants chose a female lecturer and 50% of our female participants named a female lecturer as their first choice.

We were delighted to share these data insights via LinkedIn ahead of this year’s International Women’s Day.

This year we will look to further explore this data insight as well as look to collect additional perspectives you generously share with us.

Our sustainability efforts

In the previous year, we included sustainability questions in our participant registration form, including their mode of transportation to and from Bumblekite 2024. Our collective travelled kilometers are published as part of our sustainability page. Based on their answers, we will refine our questions to optimize the process of data gathering (e.g. give an example of what data to provide).

We will continue to enhance our efforts in the upcoming iteration (a sustainability challenge might be incoming… :) and share our yearly learnings in the field of sustainability as a part of our lessons learned 2026.

A morning to recharge

A week full of inspiring knowledge, new connections and a myriad of impressions can be… tiring. Based on anecdotal data in 2023, we removed the Thursday engineering keynote lecture and instead gave our participants the opportunity to go kickboxing with Leo Celi, our opening keynote lecturer. In 2024, during our daily reflections, we also asked our participants about their energy level throughout the day. On Thursday, many reported they have been using this free time to recharge and felt more energetic afterwards. We will therefore plan one free morning in this year's schedule as well.

Schedule rearrangement: Lecture and tutorial swap

Some participants expressed their desire to start the day with a practical session instead of the engineering morning keynote. Of course, everyone’s preferences and daily rhythms are different. This year, we will switch the order of the lectures and tutorials for the last two days and collect the data on the collective experience of this action in our schedule.

Addition of the virtual follow-up programmatic features

Based on conversations with our 2024 participants and Anja’s experience as a participant in 2022, that once back in her everyday life, other things always seemed to be more urgent than reviewing materials, we decided to generate dedicated time for you to review the materials, both with your peers and with the lecturers to make sure that all open questions are answered and the knowledge, skills and your new ideas are ready to be implemented in your daily workflows. This will serve as a community building point to catch up with your peers.

At the same time, in 2024, we asked our participants in their daily reflections how many new connections they have made during the day. On average, our participants interacted with around 5 new participants on a daily basis. Our data clearly shows that even in an event as small as ours, it can be challenging to meet every person in the room, especially with an intention to build meaningful relationships. Therefore, we will also add a virtual element dedicated to relationship building, either on a 1:1 basis or in a small group setting. Similar to the rest of our programme, the virtual relationship building will also be curated manually, taking into account all the information our participants generously shared throughout our time together.

The virtual programme will start in autumn, allowing the time for the summer impressions to settle.

Communication onboarding the week before

Being in a new environment full of unknown people can make asking questions quite a challenging task for some of us. When meeting the leaders in the field, oftentimes we look to showcase our best selves. To support you in growing your confidence in asking your burning questions we will offer a communication onboarding session one week before the start of our Bumblekite week.

This effort is a part of our broader activities to design our programme to make those of us who are introverts and take a while to open up, welcome and included.

In 2023 our participants asked more than 300 questions in the span of our Bumblekite week. Asking questions has always been one of our favourite and our strongest programming features. But strengths can become weaknesses if we do not seek to carefully evolve them with the generous feedback from you, our participant. Gentle evolution of one of our core strengths, with a listening ear to your impressions, is the goal of our communication onboarding session.

Extending the lunch break

As we are continuing our lunch groups setup, we also noticed that, especially in the beginning of the week, it can be quite difficult to find your assigned lunch group, grab lunch and be back in time for the next item on the schedule, in particular as some participants want to continue their conversations with the lecturer delivering the session prior to lunch. To make sure your week is less stressful and you can enjoy your food without rush, we will extend the lunch breaks from 1h to 1h and 15 min.

A schedule for videos and photos

Our photographer, Meltem Salb, aims to capture many of our wonderful interactions, curious questions and moments of learning, laughter and simply our time spent together during the week.

However, in 2024, the extent of her presence created unwanted stress for some of our participants. This year, we will provide you with a schedule delineating at what times Meltem will be joining us to capture our collective experience. We will also add a text field in our registration form in which you can indicate how comfortable you are with being photographed and any other thoughts and considerations we should have in mind, which we will share with Meltem to take into account during her work. Moreover, Meltem and her team members will reduce the total number of hours they will spend with us, as a direct response to the feedback we received.

The goal of these actions is to lower down the information symmetry between Meltem, ourselves and you and give you a sense of control. It is also the starting point for building your relationship with Meltem, who also looks to invest quite a bit in building your relationship with her during the week with many of her thoughtful gestures and conversations on the sidelines of the programme.

Our definition of our target group of participants: “we are looking for…”

Last year we received a question from an individual in a senior management position, on whether they could participate in our Bumblekite programme as they are relatively new to the field of data science and AI, but did not match the career stage we aimed for in our participants at the time. We were delighted and honoured by the trust this person put in us by asking this question. Crafting an environment that feels safe for questions like these to be asked is precisely the goal of the substantial amount of investment in time and effort we put into writing our website.

Inspired by this question, this year, we have updated our definition from “up to 5 years of professional experience” to “up to 5 years of experience with data science and AI” to reflect the breadth of age diversity we aim to capture. It is the diversity across a variety of parameters, including one’s seniority reflected through the number of years they have committed to their professional life, that invites vulnerability in a space such as Bumblekite 2025, a key ingredient for a successful collective learning endeavour.