Summer School 2019

The two weeks at Summer School were filled to the brim with rich, exciting experiences and a broad range of lessons. Thanks to all these new ideas, each student was able to get a sense of where they’re headed, their study plans, or discover a path they never knew existed before two weeks ago.

BGL BNP Paribas is proud of everything the students achieved over the last 15 days, and would like to award them with their certificates to thank them for their commitment and motivation.

See you next year!

 

The central theme of the 2019 edition of the Summer School is communication, and what better way to illustrate the topic than through a media company?

Summer School participants visited the Essentiel news and radio premises in Differdange. How are topics chosen by editorial staff? Why define editorial guidelines? What are a newspaper’s distribution networks? Answers to all of these questions were given by Emmanuel Fleig, Director at Essentiel, and his teams. After this experience, some Summer School attendees may become journalists... let’s wait and see!

 

The Summer School is now in its second week, which is dedicated to extraordinary careers. 

A few speakers came to share their extraordinary backgrounds in sectors such as culture, with Ainhoa Achutegui, Director of the Neumünster Abbey Cultural Exchange Center, and humanities, with the participation of Philippe Houliat, founder of GEODE, committed to reducing armed violence.

From Hollywood to Kehlen

To continue inspiring them to find their path, on Tuesday 23 July, the high school students visited the Filmland studios in Kehlen. The schedule included a tour of the film studios, learning about production and post-production, editing, mixing, sound and special effects.

Cultural melting pot at 1535° in Differdange

The 1535° project in Differdange has become the epicentre of Luxembourg’s creative economy. This creative hub hosts about fifty creative companies at a former industrial site. Artists, craftspeople, engineers and designers all work at the same site. The goal of 1535° is to combine artistic creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship in the creative industries, and to show young Summer School students that it’s possible to succeed in creative professions.

 

Récit de la journée par Ameline Regrain et Thomas Schmit

"La journée a débuté par une présentation d’Emmanuelle Humann sur La RSE : la responsabilité en entreprise. 

Ensuite, Sea shepherd est venu nous présenter leur association. dont le but est de protéger les animaux marins menacés. Leur présentation était une très bonne sensibilisation pour nous tous. C’était aussi assez intéressant car c’était un sujet qui sort un peu du monde de l’entreprise. 

Après cette intéressante présentation, nous nous sommes séparés en deux groupes. Le groupe 1 est d’abord allé voir les ruches de la BGL BNP Paribas dans le jardin. C’était une activité différente et assez exceptionnelle car nous ne voyons pas des ruches tous les jours. Pendant ce temps-là, le deuxième groupe a travaillé sur les métiers et les carrières dans la salle Rotonde 4 avec Mme Ross. 

L'après-midi, nous sommes partis pour le FilmLand à Kehlen. Nous avons vu un gigantesque mur vert sur lequel certaines parties de films sont filmées en incrusant des effets techniques visuels. Nous avons rencontré ensuite l'équipe qui s’occupe du son. Compte tenu de la qualité du son, nous avions l’impression d’être dans le film. Enfin, nous avons rencontré l'équipe qui s’occupe de nouvelles technologies. On nous a fait essayer des lunettes réalité virtuelle. C’était assez marrant."

19 July: a lesson dished up by the restaurant world!

BGL BNP Paribas’ maître d’hôtel Francis Rummler trained our young Summer School attendees in the art of serving clients.

Dressed as waiters, students then helped prepare the day’s menu, serving in BGL BNP Paribas’ executive lounges and company restaurants during the lunch rush. To end the day, participants also helped wash dishes, giving them a view of the restaurant business from all angles.

The highlight of the fourth day was a presentation of new professions in artificial intelligence.

With the help of start-ups Adapti, Tetrao and LuxAI, we covered algorithms, machine learning, robotics and emerging technologies.

The infinite potential of artificial intelligence

The potential offered by future applications of artificial intelligence (AI) is infinite. Artificial intelligence is the pathway to future solutions. Three start-ups hosted by Lux Future Lab presented their innovations in widely different fields, all of which make use of artificial intelligence.

• Adapti lets websites present personalised content to their visitors depending on their interests, thereby offering them a high-quality user experience.
• Tetrao, known for having won the BNP Paribas Hackathon, offers a service to automated the collection of documents available online, making it faster and easier for professional BGL BNP Paribas customers to open an account. This solution, making it possible to reduce a process of several months down to just a few days, will soon be available to BGL BNP Paribas professional customers.
• Start-up LuxAI was commended for having developed a robot called QTrobot, which helps improve the everyday lives of autistic children and their integration into society.

Today we welcomed the class of 2019 Summer School. This morning, 23 students gathered at BGL BNP Paribas in Kirchberg. The entire CSR Accelerator team was there to welcome them and present the programme for the next two weeks.

Over the next two weeks, around fifty passionate speakers driven by a desire to transfer their knowledge will present their professions, sharing their energy and new ways of seeing things.

The programme has four key components :

1. daily activities, including meeting professionals and experts, as well as on-site tours

2.  “good to know” sessions to share useful advice for the future

3.  coaching and team-building exercises

4. communication skills group work

 

DAY 1 by Barbara Guth and Max Faeth

"We started the first day with a presentation of the Summer School team and the introduction to the program, we were all very excited to get to know one another and start the week.

Our career coach Ros Geuss got us to reflect about our interests, preferences and future plans in her inspiring presentation, followed by a short text we had to write to present ourselves. This task was not easy to complete in only several minutes especially without a structure being imposed. However, the many upcoming conversations and activities such as the self-reflection cycle will definitely help us to make our paragraphs excellent by the end of the two weeks.

The afternoon was an improvisation theatre class organised by Barbara Andréani. Working together in sometimes embarrassing situations was a perfect ice breaker for the group. By the end we were improvising hilarious scenes on stage, the group dynamic was excellent."

Let’s get started!