I’m going to break with convention. I’m not going to devote very much time to sharing the narrative of my summer, nor am I going to spend very much time discussing my research. Instead, I’m going to talk about good reasons for doing such a program, and understanding what you can hope to accomplish if you come.
Let’s start at the beginning: who are you, if you’re interested in this program? Ideally, you’re a (recent) undergraduate, with an interest in research who thinks they may want to do a PhD. What can you get from coming? Well, you can answer the following professional questions for yourself:
- What is it like to work in a graduate laboratory in my space?
- What is it like to live as a graduate student?
- Am I cut out for the nature of research in my space? (E.g. for computer science, progress is very bursty – would that bother you?)
If you come with a mind to work, and get a bit lucky, you can achieve the following professionally:
- Contribute to some cutting edge research (and potentially be co-author on a paper).
- Impress a professor, earning a letter of recommendation for graduate school.
And regardless of how much you hope to achieve for work, you can definitely do the following:
- Meet people unlike any you’ve met before.
- Travel around Switzerland, exploring the nature and culture.
- Travel around Europe, exploring the nature and culture.
As some context, I’ll share with you my take-away from this program. I did some neat research on scheduling, made friends with people from the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Italy, Ecuador, Switzerland, France, and Belgium, all while exploring Europe. At the end, I knew what it meant to be a graduate student (even my lab forgot I wasn’t one). When I came back to the United States, I didn’t have to imagine what graduate school would be like – I’d lived it, writ small. The scenery is incredible: look at some pictures.
Elias Szabo-Wexler, Carnegie Mellon University
Discrete Optimization (DISOPT)