The participating PhD candidates from various fields such as educational research, legal gender studies/European law, media anthropology, performance art, epigenetics, musicology, computer science, and economics and social science came together for the interdisciplinay summer school program between August 21-22, 2023. Funding provided by the Knowledge Transfer Center facilitated opening the program to all of the partner universities as well as universities of applied sciences. In addition to those at the Johannes Kepler University, there were participants from the Linz University of Art & Design, the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, and Mozarteum University Salzburg.

In addition to three workshops focusing on writing, public speaking, and scholarly writing, a key part of the summer school program included opportunities for the participants to share information and network. Many participants not only discovered they had individual research areas in common, but also common experiences in regard to their academic careers, accomplishments, and challenges.

All of the workshops were created with an open-ended approach in mind, adapted according to the participants' inputs and wishes. The PERFORMING WORDS workshop included a variety of body and language exercises as well as ‘presentation karaoke’, meaning presenting someone else’s texts on a topic unrelated to their own.

As part of the FREE WRITING workshop, the first step involved trying out thinking and writing experiments in terms of one's own style of writing, where to write, and writing a biography. Building on this, the second day of the workshop focused on concrete research issues in more detail as well as working in pairs to address research clusters.

Participants in the STEAMPUNK workshop recorded a pilot episode for a (fictional) podcast "STEAMPUNK. From STEM to STEAM" in one and a half days. Following the imagined STEAM machine and using metaphors consisting of driving gears and adjusting screws, the participants spoke about their individual research focus in areas such as residency law, electrical measurement techniques, swamplands and musicology and how they relate. A central aspect, in addition to freely drawing on the sci-fi genre of steampunk, included focusing on understanding topics in different areas unrelated to one’s one field of expertise, such as applying a glossary segment as part the podcast episode and developing a common language.

The Participants' Impressions:

What inspired them to want to sign up?
The ability to think-outside-of-the-box opens up new perspectives and is an opportunity to meet others.

What was the biggest take-away/ah-ha moment?
Just jumping right into things and not overthinking it all can result in a lot of space to get creative.
Starting with shitty drafts and then just starting to write. After all, a bad draft is better than no draft.
The writing itself can help bring about new ideas.

The Summer School Program: Participants and Experts:

• Anna Mendelsohn: PERFORMING WORDS.
• Lisa-Viktoria Niederberger: FREI SCHREIBEN. Creating a project schedule, the writing process, and overcoming writer’s block.
• Julia Grillmayr: STEAMPUNK. An interdisciplinary podcast experiment.
• Ilona Stütz: Organization und presentation

The Summer School program "FUTURE PROOF RESEARCH SKILLS" was offered as part of a networking project “From STEM to STEAM” by project partners WTZ East and WTZ West.