5. MSCA Satellite Event ESOF 2018

Hi friends,

I hope you are enjoying the slides from the past posts, I promise I am going to continue with the cycle, but now I want to stop a little bit to tell you about a part of the work a MSCA fellow should be involved in and the amazing family that the MCAA alumni association represents (https://www.mariecuriealumni.eu/home). 

To do that I am going to tell you about the opportunity I recently had to participate in the MSCA Satellite Event, which took place in Toulouse, France, from 7 to 8 July, before the biennial EuroScience Opening Forum (ESOF 2018, https://www.esof.eu/en/). The largest interdisciplinary science meeting in Europe!

MSCA Satellite Event. First Magistral Session

The MSCA Satellite event was directed to 30 of more than 90 Marie Curie fellows whose were participating at the MSCAscicomm competition, to win the possibility to take part in the “Science Communication Training” organized by the MCAA alumni association. During the event, the fellows had the opportunity to receive coaching sessions with experts of Debatrix (https://www.debatrix.com/nl/), the international rewarded training company, renowned in the field of persuasiveness and debate (in the picture below you can see the coach I was working with). They were teaching us techniques to improve our presentation skills, as for example, key questions to remain our audience interested, how to manage changes in the last moment, the meaning of our posture, just to mention some of them.

Coaching sessions with Debatrix

The event also allowed us to do networking with fellows and project managers from other knowledge areas that the MSCA actions cover and who are involved actively in the MCAA alumni association. In the picture below you can see some fellows I had the opportunity to share with. By the way, my partner Ronald, the ESR12 of SMARTI (https://esr12smarti.blogspot.com/) was other of the 30, it was really good for us sharing this experience together and a privilege to represent SMARTI there.

Networking with other MSCA fellows

Personally, I would like to say that I really liked to see how many dynamic and passionate people are actively involved in the MCAA alumni association and how many other activities you could work in to integrally grow during your Ph.D., I am very proud and grateful to have the opportunity to be a MSCA fellow. Do you know that there are 3 chapters in America? In United States, in Brazil, and in Argentina. As I am costarican, it was interesting for me to know how big is this program. I came looking for something more than the scientific knowledge and definitely, the MSCA grants are a wonderful opportunity to grow as researchers, as leaders, as people.

The activity also included a visit to the Airbus facilities, if you had the opportunity to go to Toulouse, you should definitely go there, it was very interesting to see how they work to make their airplanes and the different countries involved in the process.

Visit to Airbus

This is all for the moment, I hope you enjoyed the read, and as usual, if you want to know more about the next steps of my project, please stay tuned!

Keep in touch,

ESR 14-PLP.