In this report, we summarise what the executive board was up to this year in the interest of the association’s progression and for our ADSV community. This year, we focused on keeping a regular schedule of events and reviving the beloved winter retreat.
2022-2023 Executive Board (11 members)
| President | Julius Winter |
| Vice-President | Stella Krämer |
| Treasurer | Georgios Rovas |
| Event Manager | Liyan Smeding |
| Event Manager | Till Ryser |
| Event Manager | Tom Enbar |
| Internal affairs coordinator | Lucia Bonati |
| Boss Coach | Michael Vindfelt |
| Webmaster | Ahmed Sadek |
| SV Happy Hour coordinator | Danica Milovanovic |
| Fundraising manager | Asya Dolgikh |
We’re pleased to welcome board members in green to their first year on the executive board.
Internal organisation
The executive board aimed to set up a regular schedule for its most popular events such as the board game night, tea time Tuesdays and a bigger event every few months. We also decided to connect with the student representatives from the four SV programs more and offer our help in solving issues PhD’s face. This worked to some extent but scheduling these meetings proved trickier than expected.
This year we were finally able to have our big ski retreat in Leysin with 80 members from the SV community. It was a great success.
A big thank you to Lucia for organising all of our board meetings!
Shared ADSV / AESV room
We maintain SV1510 together with AESV. This room is mainly used by AESV for studying and is mostly occupied by them. It works for us for some permanent storage of games and tea time tuesdays equipment and leftover snacks and drinks from events but is limited to this. Storage of larger material is not possible at this point.
Finances
George did a fantastic job as Treasurer this year, tracking all gains to the ADSV fortune and expenses closely. The auditors had only minor comments, because, well, one has to make a comment if one is auditing! Starting this year we were able to create QR code invoices making payments from our members a lot easier and saving us some TWINT fees along the way.
Asya wrote a detailed proposal to obtain funding from the faculty last year, and obtained a promise of 6000 CHF for the association from the SV faculty. Due to budget cuts this amount had to be cut to 5000 CHF for the next board. As we were unfortunately unable to have our ski retreat in 2022 much of the 21’500 CHF were left over in the bank account. Half of this amount finally did get spent on our ski retreat in January 2023 still leaving us with a surplus of around 10’000 CHF that ADSV can again use for next year’s ski retreat.
Julius and Asya met with Harald Hirling to discuss his expectations from the association for our proposals for funding, and how much money we can reasonably obtain. We originally agreed to receive 6000 CHF but this number had to later be reduced to 5000 CHF due to budget cuts at the faculty. We agreed that satellite campus should also benefit from this funding so we offered our help in event organization to ADSV members at campus biotech in Geneva and the campus in Sion.
Members list and alumni
Julius has maintained a mailing list for adsv members ([email protected]). This can probably be done smarter and could be something to explore for the next board.
Mailing and handling contacts
Thank you Ahmed for being on top of the adsv email address and forwarding all important messages. Thank you as well for sending out any email requests we had for you.
2023 ADSV ski retreat
Till and Tom took on the task of organizing the 2023 ADSV ski retreat with the help from everyone on the board. This was a great group effort and was a huge success for the visibility of ADSV. We recorded far more participants at other events following the retreat and got great feedback from the community.
Our association has 3 goals:
- Represent the interests of Life Sciences PhD Students
- Integrate PhD Students into a community on which they can depend on for perspective, friendship and inspiration
- Promote scientific and social interaction between PhD students engaged in Life Sciences research
Represent
This goal targets the fact that PhD students are sometimes mistreated, given high expectations or mentally stressed by a PhD. We aim to protect the basic rights of PhD students and seek positive change to promote discussion to shift the environment of the PhD to a happy and exciting time. To fulfil this goal we keep in touch with the student representatives of EDBB, EDCB, EDMS and EDNE to hear how we can help and advocate for our colleagues.
Integrate the PhD Community
PhD Coaching – A big thank you to Michael who operated as Boss Coach of the PhD Coaching program this year. He recruited several new coaches this year and tirelessly (yet politely) bugged the current coaches to pair with new students to mentor. Thanks again, Michael! You did a great job.
ADSV Sweaters & T-shirts – As the sweaters from Amber were such a great success in the past years we decided to create another one this year. Following a little design competition over christmas break we voted on our favorite design at the ski retreat. The winning design came from our board member Liyan who then together with Julius went ahead to finalize the design and order the printed hoodies and gym bags. We ended up selling 38 items to our members and have some extra gym bags as gifts. We changed companies going for a more expensive, local company in Lutry but got impeccable service from Ecographic. The sweaters were sold at a slight loss for ADSV.
Promote scientific and social interaction
Events made up a large portion of our activity this year! We have to send a HUGE HUGE HUGE thank-you to Till, Tom and Liyan for coordinating (and running!!) most of these events.
ADSV Hike (04.09.2022) Julius took 26 ADSV members on a hike to La Dôle in the Jura . It was an amazing time, everyone really enjoyed it.
Crazy 88s (19.05.2022) This is an event in which participants get a list of 88 tasks with various points for each task for their team to earn. They are set loose on campus, beers in hand, and the organisers follow their progress and award points via Slack. Liyan was the mastermind behind this event.
Happy Hours (1x/month) Happy hour is sponsored by the SV faculty, but ADSV has taken the responsibility to organise it. We send massive thanks to Danica for coordinating and organising more than her fair share of Happy Hours this year! Danice was also heavily involved in understanding Mediacom’s new event rules and gave her heart into keeping happy hours on Fridays.
Game Nights (every 2nd month) Till, Liyan and Tom organized several board game nights this year with regulars having a great time at throwing burritos at each other or just enjoying each others company with a slice of pizza and a drink.
ADSV Retreat (January 2023) Till and Tom headed the organisation of the ADSV retreat along with a couple ADSV members. As stated above this was a huge success and great fun for all participants. Thank you to all our helpers.
JumpSpot (21.10.2022) Liyan took us to Jumpspot again and showed us how to do a backflip. This is a great event for us to destress and feel like kids again. Well at least until the next day when we feel every muscle in our body.
Mystery dinner (15.09.2022) Till spearheaded this special event where participants jumped into a character at a 20’s dinner party.
Tea Time Tuesdays (every other week) Stella kindly continued the lead on this project. The idea of this event is to create an on-going event in which PhD students can rely on happening often, and can drop by to meet new people, and have a well-deserved coffee/tea/cookie. Our valentines day special edition was also a fun little extra event organized by Tom.
Easter scavenger hunt (12.04.2023) A huge thank you to Tom and Till for organizing such a fun scavenger hunt for easter. Despite the rain, 5 teams of 4 went around the west side of campus to find clues as to where the easter bunny was kidnapped to.
Halloween party – For halloween Tom organized a big party at the refuge in Ecublens. We had a great turnout and a fun time with plenty of silly and creative costumes.
Special edition lake happy hour – As the happy hour takes a summer break Tom had the brilliant idea of bringing a couple of happy hour supplies down to the lake at Parc Bourget. The turnout was massive and it was an exceptional evening in great company.
Find your lab – Together with AESV we brainstormed to find a way to revamp the SV in Extenso event they had been organizing in the past. We came to the conclusion that a conference style event called find your lab would be great way for bachelors and masters students to find labs they could do their projects in. The first edition of the event will happen on May 16.
A final THANK YOU to everyone on the board. This was a particularly productive year and it was incredibly enjoyable to work with everyone. I am excited to see what the next board comes up with in the next year and wish them all the best of success.