5 universities in Europe, 40 students and facilitators from the 5 institutions, mainly Imperial College. It was a fun-filled 3 days full of activities and discussions. Also, a trip to Eton College(the elite boys’ school where most royalties go to and where 19 of Britain’s Prime Ministers were educated) as well as Windsor. We had really bubbly and knowledgeable tour guides for both the tours. One set back was that it was raining the whole day!
I found it amusing that the Europeans were so keen on trying everything English-food, ale, culture etc. Personally, I do not find British food very appealing – I long for the occasional English breakfast, but when it is served three days in a row, one can only lose interest. However, the food served at Easthampton Park were of good standard-buffet style is always welcomed! The last dinner was awesome – proper seating with wine and we were served.
The activities were fun but I did not find them very challenging except for the last one – a competition to work with another participant from a totally different field of study and different institution. I worked with Freddy who is from Aachen, Germany. Imagine an Electrical Engineer and a Biologist(who’s concentrating on immune cells) – we came up with something bizarre: to discover the network that exist between the components in the immune cell.
At the end of the course, when we were meant to reflect upon the things we did and what we could extract form the course, many of us had to think hard to actually see what were the benefits. No doubt we learnt a lot, but mostly were reinforcing things we already knew. Personally, I found the ethics lecture boring but it opened my eyes to teh existence of ethical issues in certain scientific study – which I was totally ignorant about before this. The only ethical thing in my field would be concerning the environment, not really impacts on human(at least not directly). For me the best aspect of it were the network built during this course and the chats we had after dinner(with or without drinks) – regarding so many different things in life!
