First edition of CARLA Camp VUB Brussels

VUB B-PHOT organized on 23 and 25 March 2021 a very successful virtual CARLA camp. Tuesday, 23/03/2021, was dedicated to Photonics careers in Academia; Thursday, 25/03/2021, to Photonics, careers in Industry and a career as an entrepreneur in the Photonics world. The Photonics topics were interspersed with presentations on soft skills. For each target group, bachelor, master, PhD’s or post-docs, there were inspirational talks divided into three pre-defined tracks. The red track: new in Photonics World, the green track: Photonics Business and the blue track: Innovating with photonics.

A total of 91 participants showed up at the online event, with 24 speakers. There were 3-panel discussions (an Academia panel, an entrepreneur panel and an industry panel) and 3 parallel sessions. In the first parallel session, participants learned about Photonics innovations. The second one was about applications and research with Photonics, and in the third parallel session, there was some room for soft skill workshops.

Information about the attendees and their opinions was collected before and after the camp. The profile of the attendants was diverse in terms of gender, stage of their career, and cultural backgrounds. Of these, 22% identified themselves as women and 78% as men. 37% were university students (undergraduate and master), 37% had PhDs, 11% were post-docs, and 15% were others. Attendees gave the CARLA camp 4 points rating over 5. The degree to which they were clear as to the options available for a career in photonics went up from a starting score of 3.27 to 4.20, reflecting the positive impact of the camp. In general, the camp was very well-liked and received much praise.

In conclusion, the CARLA camp Brussels was a successful event that will definitely be repeated each year. Hopefully, next year, it will be a live edition, but we are considering keeping the positive items from an online version. To engage more participants to register for the event, we would like to organize a hybrid event next year. The event will be live, but there will be a possibility to follow most sessions online as well.