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Summer Student Program
Goal
Establish links between existing student activities in all of the member organizations, in order to:
- Explore Grid technology in the contexts of the different EIROforum Group organizations.
- Exchange information between organizations, gain manpower with a fresh point of view for requirement gathering.
- Tie the Grid-related activities of the organizations to the dissemination and training activities of the organizations.
Structure of the projects
The program could be based on the model of the CERN openlab summer student program. Compared to a typical training activity, the approach has put more emphasis on:
- Autonomous team work of the student teams, flexibility. Allowing evolution of the plans during a short time.
- Linking concrete work during the stay with charting longer-term opportunities
- This has lead to several follow-up projects taking place in the network of CERN stakeholders - also "spin-off" research projects with third parties taking the initiative.
- Organic linking with real, mission critical activities of the organization
- While the projects have skunkworks/mission impossible flavor, they are exploring areas that are closely linked with the core purpose of the organization. This is an important motivational factor.
- Multidisciplinary approach
- Differentiate from the mainstream program of the institute
- Cross-pollination and resulting innovations
- Great asset in communication activities - forces translation of and reflection on the application area specific jargon.
Practical issues
The above approach requires some re-organizing of the support from the host organization. It is important not to mix the "autonomy" with neglect. The total amount of support-work required for the student groups is probably similar as with a traditional program, but the load will not be even. Initiating the project (introduction to the topic, team building) will require between 3-4 weeks of full-time work from one person. Another load peak will be at teh end of the project.
In the openlab program the setup cost was relatively high, since the time students spend at CERN tended to be quite short and practical issues (housing, computer accounts, offices, computers,...) tend to take a lot of time if the activity is not tied to an existing program.
Finding suitable person that can be detached from daily routines for this time and who has the necessary contacts in the organization is one of the critical success factors.
Model of linking activities
First step in linking activities is a face-to-face meeting of the people running the student programs in each of the organizations. Mainly needed to facilitate contact in the future, but also to discuss things like document repositories, when and how to introduce student teams together, what level of contact to maintain between activities that are not directly linked and so on.
On the tool side, a repository of the following information could be considered:
- Project descriptions, groups, contact information
- Links to relevant information sources
- Links to project software and document archives
Assuming the summer projects will remain in the scope of about two months, it is probably best to involve initially only two institutes in each of the individual projects. During the progress of the work it is possible to monitor natural connections that may emerge between the activities.
Relevant student program models in each of the institutes
- CERN
- Roughly two-month stay at CERN, cost 5000,- CHF/student, cofunded by CERN and external sponsors (academic funding agencies, CERN openlab partners etc). Hosts: CERN openlab, CERN IT communications team. Start and end dates of stay negotiable, open to continuation of the projects if more external funding available (e.g. technical student or fellow programs).
- EFDA
- EMBL
- ESA
- ESO
- ESRF
- ILL
Possible topics
Based on the initial discussions in the First F2F meeting, the following projects could have natural synergies:
- Communication tools
- Legacy application integration pilots
- Use-case scenarios developed in collaboration with the application scientists and Grid experts.
- Joint testbed activities
- Essentially deployment pilot, a test of issues related to negotiations with the IT and network support in each of the organizations.
Steps to take in 2005
- Clarifying the level of support from each of the organizations in terms of funding structure
- Selection of summer student program champions, agreeing on strategy for advertising the new opportunity
- Face-to-face meeting of summer student program champions, defining the projects to be linked and organizations involved in them
- Creation of teams and establishing the initial links between them
- Running of the program during the summer 2005
- Post mortem of the projects, plans for the 2006.
Long-term scenarios
Based on the post-mortem of the projects, the program could evolve to include following:
- EU funded long-term explorative research collaborations
- Spin-off activities
- Product- and service concepts that could be developed further with either public or industrial support
- Linking of the program with other outreach activities, such as
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