Michail in Germany

Summer School Experience – Bonn, Germany

The 5th International Summer School on Radar was organised by Fraunhofer FHR and took place in a small village called Rolandseck just outside of Bonn, Germany. There were just over 40 of us from all around the world staying together in Haus Humboldtstein, a 19th Century Neo-Gothic building overlooking the Rhine.

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We arrived on a Friday afternoon and the summer school kicked off with a welcoming party on the balcony, setting the tone for the fast-paced week which lay ahead of us. We spent the weekend getting to know each other. After a day of exploring Cologne, we stayed for the magnificent Cologne Lights fireworks festival. It was an unbelievable event with ships racing up and down the river and launching overwhelming fireworks, perfectly synchronized with the music playing all around the city. The next day was spent cycling through Bonn, ferrying across rivers and enjoying German food and beer.

The academic programme started Monday morning and everything was planned with German efficiency. We each received a folder with a detailed schedule, biographies of each of the lecturers and colour printouts of all the lecture slides. The majority of the summer school participants were PhD students from a wide variety of backgrounds, all within radar-related fields. There were participants researching topics ranging from radar hardware design to SAR image processing. A few weren’t even directly involved in radar design, but rather in research that applied the use of radar to fields such as hydrology or satellite-based mapping. In an attempt to accommodate everybody, each of the lectures therefore started with the basics and accelerated rapidly to a more advanced level.

I was impressed by the quality of the lectures. Each of the lecturers was an expert in his field, with the ability to explain complex topics with great clarity and enthusiasm. The lecturers had flown in from all around the world to speak at the summer school, including California, Paris, Ottowa, Rome, Napels, Delft and Aachen and they all represented cutting edge research institutions such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the European Space Agency.

The summer school also involved a day and a half of work on practical projects that applied the theory covered in the lectures. There were seven different workshops to choose from and on the morning of the last day each group was given an opportunity to present their results to rest of the participants.

The organisers put great enthusiasm into planning the evening activities and one of the highlights of the summer school was meeting so many interesting people who are enthusiastic about what they do. We hiked up to the ruins of Rolandseck Castle together to have drinks on the terrace of a restaurant with a wonderful view of the Rhine Valley, we travelled on a ferry to visit the beer garden across the river and halfway through the week we enjoyed ‘Bergfest’ with live music and a braai on the balcony.

Tuesday afternoon we took a bus to the Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency Physics and Radar Techniques and were given guided tours of all their exciting research projects, including a massive dome housing a tracking and imaging radar for space observation. We were given demonstrations of fully functional hardware such as millimetre wave scanners and the opportunity to ask the design engineers questions.

By the time the summer school came to an end, everybody agreed that it had been a success on every front. The week had been so densely packed with information and activities that it would take weeks to fully process everything that had been learnt. I left Germany with a new set of valuable contacts and friends from all around the world.

Pre-departure:

I’ve always wanted to spend a semester abroad and was a bit disappointed to find out that as an undergraduate engineering student at Stellenbosch University, this is not really possible. This is due to the fact that the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA) is unable to accredit our degree if it is not fully completed in South Africa. The next best option for me was therefore to find out about summer school opportunities.

I had a look on the international office’s website and while there was a list of summer schools that could be applied for all around the world, not one of them were in an engineering-related field. I visited the international office and was given a list of partner universities; if I could find one offering a summer school that I was interested in, the international office would contact them and find out if arrangements can be made for me to attend.

I spent a few evenings browsing university websites and was amazed at the large number of exciting opportunities available to students. When I saw a summer school focused on radar scheduled for the last week of my July holidays, it seemed perfect.

After making up my mind, there was the routine process of filling out application forms, writing motivations and filling out more forms. Somehow everything worked perfectly, though and I received confirmation from international office that a travel bursary had been granted shortly after that confirmation from Germany that I had been accepted into the programme.

My travel bursary from the university paid out R13 000. Fortunately, the radar summer school was sponsored by Cassidian and therefore the fees for students were subsidised and the total cost for accommodation, food and tuition was €600. A friend of mine works for Swiss Air and was able to purchase a special flight ticket for me at a reduced price of R7000. The great thing was that she was able to book one of the seats right at the front of economy class for me and the extra legroom was amazing – if at all possible, try to get one of these seats when booking your flight :-). The bursary therefore covered my major costs and all that was left for me to pay for out of my own pocket were train tickets and beer. There is also the additional R700 cost of a Schengen Visa that you need to keep in mind.

My summer school was scheduled for the last week of the July holidays and so I decided to fly up to Europe two weeks earlier and make the most of the European summer. My first week was spent in Switzerland visiting friends. The highlight was a two-day hike along a glacier in the Alps that included an overnight stay in a cabin 3400m above sea level. I then made my way to Germany where I spent a three days with a friend in Mainz. From here I set-off on a train, travelling up along the Rhine river towards Bonn, feeling refreshed and ready for the summer school week that lay ahead.

Return:

 A day after arriving back in Stellenbosch, I ended up in bed with tick-bite fever. I’d been bitten two weeks earlier in Switzerland while rock climbing in a forest and fortunately did not have any symptoms until after the summer school.  Apparently Switzerland is quite a dangerous place to visit as far as ticks are concerned.

The greatest thing about returning from the summer school for me is the way in which I arrived home with refreshed perspective on both my studies and life in general. On the one hand, it was wonderful to gain exposure to exciting international research, but it was also great to realise, by speaking to and working with students from other parts of the world, that the work they are doing and the problems they are solving are not too different from that being done in our E&E engineering department here in Stellenbosch.

My time in Europe was very short, but even so, being surrounded with people from so many different cultures for a week opened my eyes to new ideas and ways of looking at the world. I will definitely miss the German beer, the organized and efficient public transport and the good food, though perhaps not the Schweinshaxe too much.

I kept in contact with a few of the people I met at the summer school. At one of the summer school social events I’d casually spoken to an engineer from a radar research lab at École Supérieure d’Électricité in Paris about postgraduate opportunities in France. We kept in touch via email and he was able to arrange a master’s internship for me at SONDRA, a joint laboratory involving Supelec and the National University of Singapore. The details will be finalised this week, but it seems that I will be going to Paris next year to begin work on a master’s project involving the design of a time modulated antenna array for radar applications. My studies and my stay in Paris will be fully funded by Onera, the French Aerospace Lab.

In my opinion, one of the greatest things about attending an international summer school is the opportunity it gives you to meet people and the exposure you get to fresh ideas and different ways of life. In my case at least, this summer school has helped to shape the direction of my life for next few years and provided me with an exciting opportunity for postgraduate study that would otherwise not have been possible.

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