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As part of our short summer break, instead of bringing you a shiny new story, we want to share some information on our S3 alumni survey. So strap on your seatbelts and get ready for some stats!

As you might know by now, we started this blog as an extension of our idea to get in touch with our alumni. Now, how are we doing that?

We made a small survey with questions about you and your current career, followed by questions about your experiences from Summer School(s) of Science and finishing up by asking if you would like to stay in touch with us. The main idea behind this is to get to know you a bit better, to get an idea about your location (so we could, maybe, organize reunions in different countries) or to find out where are you in your career (to possibly get you in contact with people that might offer a lab rotation, or who could provide a piece of advice). Sounds good, no?

However, such a survey isn’t without its challenges – the School has existed for over a decade, our organizers are volunteers that always change. Even though they leave behind an extensive list of emails, those might become invalid over time – and leave our attempts to reach out undelivered. Furthermore, to establish a solid network, we need your input. Don’t worry about whether you are too young or too old, or if you’ve changed your career path and left science altogether or if you completely dropped out of graduate school! These are all our stories, and stories that might help others grow!

So where are we now?

We started off with our youngest generation, from 2019, and sent out emails to all participants, organizers, and swapshop and project leaders, making our way all the way back to 2011. That means we’ve sent out 450 emails in total!

Have you participated in at least one edition of S3 between 2011 and 2019 and haven’t received the link to our survey? Please write to us at alumni@drustvo-evo.hr or summerschoolofscience@gmail.com to get access to it!

While checking our records from between 2011 and 2019, we found some long-standing S3 heroes:

• the most long-lasting involvement with S3 (5 times) – Sebastijan Dumancic and Nikolina Sostaric (Croatia)
• the most projects lead (4 times) – Renan Gross (Israel)
• from zero to hero – participating in all roles at the school (4 times) – Nemanja Jankovic (Serbia)
• the most long-standing participants (3 times) – Mislav Unger and Antonia Bukovac (Croatia)

Kudos to all of them! However, keep in mind that we’ve just scratched the surface. There is still a few years’ worth of records to look at!

What have we collected so far?

So far, we have received 105/450 (23.3%) responses, out of which 60 to 45 responses come from females as opposed to males. Furthermore, it has been filled out by 54 Croatians, 10 Spaniards, 7 Hungarians, 5 Serbs and French, 4 Germans, 3 Bosnians, 2 each coming from the USA, Russia and Portugal, and 1 each from Georgia, Israel, Denmark, Belgium, Lithuania, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Montenegro, the UK, Netherlands and India. Quite a nice mix, wouldn’t you say?

Currently, even though we all live in different countries around the world, we could have reunions in the following places:

• Croatia – 38 people
• Switzerland – 10 people
• Spain – 8 people
• the UK – 7 people
• Serbia, Germany – 6 people
• Belgium, Hungary – 5 people
• France – 4 people
• Canada, Czech Republic – 2 people

This is only based on current stats, who knows what could happen in a few months when our numbers grow! If you would like to get in touch with someone living in your country, or maybe even in your city, let us know!

The majority of people are still studying, most are working towards a BSc, less so an MSc. There are, however, 20 people out of everyone surveyed who are already employed, with 3 of them being self-employed. Most of them are in the biosciences, math and computer science, but we have some people studying music, geophysics or business.

Finally, what makes us happy is that the vast majority of the people surveyed would like to come back to S3 (102/105), with those other few admitting they are too busy with other things in their lives. Most people would also like to give back to the S3 community by giving a lecture or leading a project or swapshop! We will definitely keep that in mind for future calls! Also, lots of people would like to mentor a student (possibly outside of S3), yet another interesting opportunity which we could explore in future issues.

That’s it for the moment! We hope you enjoyed our little summary and that you will check your emails and write to us in case you haven’t received a link to the survey! We also hope that you will keep on reading and, hopefully, talking to us.

To end with a nice summer refreshment, here are some amazing nature photos taken from our holidays! Till the next time!

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