I’m Martin from Slovakia, studying BSc Mathematics (just finished 2nd year) and this summer I took part in a Summer School by University of Zürich.
The term summer school doesn’t really sound very appealing, however I was genuinely impressed of the quality of this opportunity given by UZH. Due to the coronavirus outbreak I wasn’t able to secure any longer internship/placement for this summer. Luckily UZH decided to provide their Summer School online. I was expecting very ‘chilled’ timetable and flexible deadlines. Overall I had planned many activities to do while doing the summer school. I have to say, I was very wrong.
The first day of the Summer School we were given a brief introduction to the course, and were divided into groups of 5. The lectures were spreaded throughout whole days, and so the first days were very hectic. Then the assignments began to come. The assignments were aimed mostly to be done in groups, which required high flexibility and cooperability with 4 other members of your group, each in different timezone, with different background. Finishing the first week completely exhausted and stressed wasn’t anything I expected, but the knowledge and experience I got just from one week was irreplaceable.
The next 2 weeks were very similar, however the course director allowed us to be more flexible with timing. For example before the deadlines were strict and all the lectures were compulsory to attend. To finish the course we needed to submit a big final group project, designing our own blockchain solution to our idea based on any of the platforms we were presented with.
The course was very well structured. The lectures covered the blockchain technology from different points of views – technology, finance and law. The speakers were professionals in the field. Moreover, we had presentations of a variety of blockchain-based platforms by people from the industry. For the final project we had their support to ask for any help while working with their platform.
Overall, the Summer School was a great opportunity to learn something new. Very intense 3 weeks, but definitely worth the stress and time. Met a lot of new people from different countries and cultures. Even though it was just an online course, forcing us to work together made us get to know each other very well and we can now say we made new friends.