Image: Carlo Venturi. Students and lecturers during a discussion session.
Last spring, I was fortunate to be invited to lecture at the “BCD summer school” held in Corsica at the Institut d’Études Scientifiques de Cargèse.
The BCD summer school is designed as a shared forum for physics masters students from Bologna, Clermont-Ferrand and Dortmund. It was formed out of friendships and collaborations between lecturers at those three universities, and has eventually given rise to an awesome joint masters programme “International Masters in Advanced Methods in Particle Physics” (IMAPP, https://imapp.eu) where students spend 6 months in each city as part of their training. It’s also funded by the Erasmus Mundus programme. If you are or know any talented undergraduates who are interested in this masters, do point them towards it.
The school itself is a week long and invites lecturers like me to discuss cutting edge topics and give masterclasses in key skills in an incredible venue by the raging seas of Corsica. See the photo above! The history of the site, which is owned by the French CNRS research body and hosts dozens of summer schools per year in different fields, is that it was originally a school founded in the 60’s by theoretical physicist Maurice Levy, and supported by Nobel Prize winner Georges Charpak. At the time, there was a blackboard on the beach and everyone would sleep in a nearby barn. These days there are better facilities, but the building of links between promising students and experienced researchers remains the same.
A member of the IMAPP staff, Carlo Venturi, has documented this year’s school in a series of short videos: https://imapp.eu/bcd-school-2024-web-series/. I feature in episode 3. So if you’ve ever been curious about what I am like in teaching mode, you can take a look!
Louie D. Corpe 