In October it was time for the different SFUs to meet at a network meeting, this time in beautiful Trondheim.
The morning had an early start at 5 AM in Bergen. A bit short of time we rushed to Flesland airport to catch the 06:55 AM flight to Trondheim, getting the rest of our sleep on the plane. We arrived at Gløshaugen Campus NTNU in Fram’s innovation Collective at 10 AM for the student meeting. The conference was arranged by Diku and was hosted by SFUs Excited and Engaged. Here we met representatives from the other SFUs around Norway. This included; ProTed from The Arctic University of Norway, Matric from the University of Agder, Spark with representatives from The North University, Cefima from The Innland University of Applied and Cempe from the Norwegian Academy of Music. Being a bit new to the bioCEED family we were surprised and happy to see the number of SFUs existing in Norway.
Fram’s innovation collective is a place where innovative and creative students meet to nurture their ideas, or just to study and hang out. Here we had the opportunity to get to know each other better as well as discussing our contribution to the centre for excellence in education. It turns out that the centres are organised in very different ways, and they focus on different things of education. E.g. At NTNU the focus largely revolves around entrepreneurships and start – ups, compared to bioCEED who focus on better quality in biology education, and how future biologists are taught. We soon learned that we have potential for better cooperation, communication and exchange of ideas and experiences between the SFUs.
After the student meetup lunch was served in the cantina, where we met up with the rest of the SFU representatives. The rest of the day we had seminars and presentations, as well as an entrepreneurial game, both to get familiar with each other and to find the entrepreneur in ourselves. We played a version of scrabble, which can only be described as “scrabble on speed”. We believe the exercise was made to illustrate the market mechanism, where the letters are resources and the words are the products. We had a certain amount of time each round, and it was quite challenging. Ingvild found it interesting and fun, Pernille found it very stressful.
Even though the schedule for the day was packed, we managed to sneak away for some very efficient sightseeing before ending the day with a three-course meal at Scandic Lerkendal.
The following day Ingvild left for Iceland, while Pernille stayed in Trondheim to join the rest of the conference before going back to Bergen. It was a hectic 32 hours, but both educational and fun days.
Greetings,
Pernille and Ingvild