Participating in summer schools has always seemed to me both fascinating and frightening at the same time: you will spend days or weeks expanding your knowledge on your area and meeting people who share similar interests, but you will miss days of your summer holiday. And sometimes, these are the days on which you had relied on for finishing up some work you were supposed to have finished. Oops!
However, 2021 seemed different. The pandemic is not over yet, I find the idea of (not virtually) meeting people scary, I need to enhance my motivation a bit more too, so why not apply to a couple of interesting summer schools?
The first one was LxMLS. Held virtually this year, free for students, and with an interesting curriculum. I was happy to be accepted in it! I was already familiar with some of the material, but it was still helpful to see things you already know from a different perspective (or just make a revision). Altough there were great options for socialising I didn't actively participated in them to be honest. But I had the opportunity to connect with many participants via LinkedIn, and some of them have very similar interests to mine.