Tatiana Kholiavko, PHD student at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg (Germany), was a participant in the summer school of Contamination Lab organised from 10-14th July by UNICT (Italy). She has taken time to share her experiences.
This summer I had the chance to attend the Eunice Contamination Lab Summer School in Catania, Italy. It was the prize for winning the Startup Idea pitch competition.
This experience started with three months of online workshops where my team and I learned how to develop a startup idea from scratch, validate it and develop a business model. We have created the ‘tAIny design’ project, an innovative AI-powered software to design tiny houses that are sustainable, affordable and tailored to customer needs with real-time 3D visualisation. Our hard work and persistence paid off. We and a few other teams won a memorable week in Sicily.
Arriving in Catania, Sicily, the workshop sessions were full of innovative and collaborative tasks that required us to work in intercultural teams. This intercultural team composition allowed us to learn how to embrace the power of diversity in problem-solving and decision making.
One notable workshop was based on the ‘Lego Serious Play‘ method. A rather simple method with an outstanding result, where participants access the whole brain, including the subconscious, as their hands guide the Lego pieces, helping them to think and communicate ideas and thoughts more easily.
The summer school was intense, and I learned a lot, but it was not all work. In the evenings we experienced the vivid Sicilian culture. We met local and international students, tried authentic Sicilian food, went swimming in the Mediterranean, hiked to volcano Etna and enjoyed the city’s beautiful nightlife.
Now, as I return to BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg for my PhD, I take with me not only memories but also valuable insights and skills that I will apply in my current work and future endeavours.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
My name is Tatiana Kholiavko. I am a PhD student at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg researching the soil-atmosphere CO2 exchange in a post-mining ecosystem and I am a part-time Eunice Project Officer coordinating language courses and tasks connected to global competencies. In my free time I love doing yoga, hiking and travelling, I have visited 30 countries. Apart from online Eunice Contamination Lab (ECLab) and ECLab Summer School, I have taken the MOOC: Introduction to Global Studies, which gave me a lot of insights into highly discussed topics nowadays from a globalised perspective. I highly recommend to all students to sign up to available courses and Eunice projects. They will not only give you state-of-the-art knowledge, but also connect you to a multicultural community.
