The last three days, me and many other current PhD students from IGSSE (International Graduate School for Science and Engineering) spent an enjoyful time in Raitenhaslach near Burghausen at this year’s IGSSE Forum.

It is an opportunity not only for PhD students, but also for Professor and PTLs (Project Team Leaders) to connect from different research fields in science and engineering, to exchange opinions or to chat informally.

Every PhD student was supposed to choose 1 of 9 workshops consisting of three parts each. I decided to attend workshop 7 on Impact and Open Science. The first part was about Open Science in which we discussed e.g. open access journals and barriers of today’s publishing procedures. Scientific Impact was topic of the second part. While discussing what that actually means, I found out that many of colleagues had different definitions on that term which was interesting. The third and last part was about Visual Communication in Science. We learnt that “less is more” which was a confirmation of my attitude on that topic. A very helpful tool that was recommended by our trainer was Adobe(TM)’s Color Wheel. It proposes colors that give a good design when you combine them.

The place of the seminars and the hotel we stayed at were perfect for the forum’s purpose. I enjoyed the silence there a lot and am looking forward to IGSSE Forum 2019.