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Gothenburg, 8-10 September 2011
Closing report
Robert Rehammar and Karin Södervall
The seminar was arranged by SER for Young engineers in EUREL and was distributed over three days with the programme seen in the appendix. There were 10 attendants, coming from Italy, Sweden, Poland, Germany and Austria. Thursday was reserved for arrival and social activities. The participants took a ride in the Gothenburg version of the London eye. In the evening the participants and organizers had get-together at a local restaurant.
Friday was the main event day where talks from 5 presenting companies were given on the two subjects of the meeting. In the morning three talks were given on nanotechnology followed by a demonstration of the clean room facilities at the Micro- and nanotechnology department of Chalmers. In the afternoon there were three presentations on embedded electronic design by representatives from the industry.
On Saturday there was a guided tour in the Gothenburg opera house where the participants where demonstrated the technology used in a modern theater. After the opera demonstration, a short wrap-up session was held and the event was formally closed. Several photos were taken during the seminar days, including the group picture seen on the front of this report. A few more photos are available in the appendix.
Summary of preparation work
Preparation work consisted primarily of
1. Contacting lecturer and guides
2. Reservation of accommodations and meals
3. Reserving the venue
4. Making programme information and communicating the programme
5. Arranging travel details for the participants
Of these points, point 4 turned out to be the absolutely most tricky one to perform. There is an extended discussion about this in the last section of this document, discussing future similar arrangements.
The companies that were contacted turned out to be very positive to giving talks. After discussions about content details, all companies involved, including the opera and the university, were all willing to find a suitable lecturer.
Reservation of accommodations and meals worked out well. It should however be noted for future arrangements that it is probably advantageous to have longer period between sign-up deadline and the actual arrangement to better be able to handle variations in the number of participants.
The whole venue was taking place at the technical university in Gothenburg, Chalmers university of technology. This worked out well, but was not offered to us free of charge.
Adverts of the programme was made available on the SER homepage, via posts to the YEP and on selected channels available to the programme direction. For the whole arrangement there was a limit of 20 participants set, and in advance it was expected that this limit would be reached. This limit was set by the maximum number of people the clean room tour could take. Since there were only 10 people attending, the limit was not reached and the programme committee believes that the main reason for this is a failure in communicating the event. This is further discussed in the final section of this document. In general it was very difficult to get feedback on whether the information had reached the potential participants in the different societies. There were no problems associated with travel arrangements.
Economy
The whole arrangement was advertised as requiring an attendance fee of € 50. This fee included all expensed in connection to the arrangement except traveling costs to and from Gothenburg. The expenses (in SEK, approx 10:1 to €) for the arrangement can be found in the table below:
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1
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Accommodation
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7,300
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2
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Meals, expenses social activities etc.
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5,892
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3
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Local transportation
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1,170
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4
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Study visit
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2,000
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5
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Rental venue and costs related to the venue
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3,000
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|
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Total
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19,362
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Evaluation comments
Only two evaluations have arrived. They are shown below, including questions:
What did you like the most with the seminar?
I liked the fact that they spoke to us as engineers and didn't waste time on talking about number of employees and last year's revenue etc.
Did the seminar fulfill your expectations?
Yes, it was far above my expectations.
What could have been differently?
It could have been even more seminars. When you're devoting a long weekend from Thursday to Saturday or Sunday, one might as well maximize the number of seminars.
How did you receive information about the seminar?
Information from my programme directors.
How do you think the approach with two relatively different subject worked?
Very good. In the end, for engineers all subjects are very interesting.
Do you have any suggestion on how to make more people participate in these kind of events in the future?
On a university, make the companies sponsor the event with free lunch sandwiches or similar.
Any other comments?
Great Job! I'm very glad that I attended.
Questions to work out in future arrangements
In this section we like to highlight two topics we believe are important for future similar arrangements to succeed.
Selecting a time
Selecting an appropriate time for an arrangement such as this is probably a key factor. The time chosen for this event was probably not optimal, being located too close to the summer vacation. This made information about the event not available to possible participants. It also make the timing a bit stressed after summer when the final details should be fixed. We believe a later date of the year would probably have been more suitable.
We believe also that it is of key importance to determine where in the week the arrangement is placed. This arrangement was placed in the weekend to allow participants to spend the rest of the weekend in Gothenburg for private activities. This option was used by some of the participants, whereas others expressed this as an inconvenience.
Advertising the event
Another key question to be considered is how an arrangement such as this should be advertised. There were comments about missing information on the SER web page. This is probably partly explained by the fact that the SER web host had some problems close to the arrangement. Probably we should also have paid better attention to this and put up more information on the web.
Detta är ett utdrag ur slutrapporten från Eurel-seminariet den 8 - 10 september, 2011. Den fullständiga rapporten med bilagor och bilder finns i pdf-format på länken
www.ser.se/download/eurelseminar_closing_report.pdf.
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