First Day

So I think I've been in the Netherlands too long: I got excited when I got to Belgium and saw a hill. Seriously, I thought, 'oh, a hill!' Also, the ground in France somehow seems firmer to the eye, less likely to sink under your feet. Anything else interesting on the bus? Umm... a 7 hour journey became 8.5. I sat next to a Sri Lankan girl who spoke no Dutch, English, or French, and I met her sister in the Hague before we boarded, and she had me sit with her in case something happened, so I could take care of her. Her brother met us in Paris and he was super, super nice, like I'd just smuggled her out of Nazi Germany or something, and insisted I take his number, and let him ride the metro with me to my stop, and make sure to call him if I needed ANYTHING.

So I don't have much time to write right now, but the program: obviously the first time, definitely disorganized, we had some boring presentations from corporate sponsors and some interesting ones from the organizers. The program is called Climate KIC, and it stems from the idea that there should be a top-notch research institution in Europe to rival the likes of MIT. Of course, everyone would want to be the host of such an institution, so what the EU did was to place the (administrative) headquarters of the EIT in Budapest, and then form Knowledge and Innovation Communities, or KICs, with partner European institutions. Different universities were allowed to apply to host KICs, and currently there are 3: information and communication technologies, energy, and climate. The goal of this KIC is to create a new generation of green innovators and entrepreneurs (so not necessarily people starting new businesses, but at least innovating at current ones, or in governments and non-profits). We'll start by doing background theory in Paris at the Ecole Polytechnique, and then move on to business and entrepreneurship theory at the Imperial College of London, and finish developing business plans at ETH Zurich (Swiss Institute of Technology). The four research and innovation themes (assessing climate change and managing drivers, low-carbon cities, adaptive water management, and zero carbon production systems) will be integrated throughout via lectures and readings. Like I said though, it's a bit chaotic right now, we already had a change-up in the lecture schedule for today, so we'll see how it actually pans out!

The other students seem pretty sharp and interesting; lots of people are from interdisciplinary studies. There are 50 of us here, selected from 250 applicants. We're mostly male (2/3rds) master students under 20 (one of the organizers said that this made him excited, because he was tired of just talking about innovation with people his age who weren't really going to do anything). There are a few people from the working world, and a few PhD students. There's a couple token Indians, but the rest of us are white Western Europeans (this is actually kind of interesting because at TU Delft there are lots of non-white/Europeans: Indians, Chinese, various African countries. I was a bit surprised how white the group was). Anyways, we'll be doing different team exercises this week, then presenting business ideas next week and self organizing into teams. If you want to see more of what we're doing, check out the wiki!

Paris is nice.