Thirty-three students, who spent 12 months in the program, worked on projects as versatile as their backgrounds. Nearly two hours of pitches and conversations on stage flew by quickly, and each presentation offered ample ground for further conversation with alumni and friends of the program at the gathering afterwards. Over drinks, former members of the program talked about their experiences, and the new cohort of talents already started making plans for their moment on stage in about a year’s time.
Quite a number of ideas focused on sustainability: One team worked on plastic pollution in our rivers and used the example of the Neckar in Stuttgart - with a rainbow fish narrating their story! Another group teamed up with IBA’27 to close material cycles in the construction sector, and yet another team created “UniShare” – a community app for university members to reduce and reuse products, and to educate students and staff on how to achieve a smaller ecological footprint. Three teams chose topics from the field of education. One group compared the quality of schools systems in Germany and Ukraine, another created a teaching toolbox for our university to improve the quality of lectures, and team “Realtopia” tackled the dysfunctional political debate culture by developing a game for pupils in humanities classes. Its goal: providing a safe space for debating, the exploration of negotiation strategies, learning about political mechanisms and fostering empathy for others. “KIdeasInMotion” organized a full-day event to engage students with AI and enlisted three company partners who offered their industry experience to enrich the program.
Finally yet importantly, two architecture students will continue their project beyond the official program. Stanislava and Mariia are planning to establish the IBA format in Ukraine. The goal of the project is to support the reconstruction of destroyed building landscapes in zones destroyed by the war by bringing together experts from Germany and Ukraine, and by engaging the public. The team was able to gain the support of their faculty, the IBA’27 organizers in Stuttgart, as well as the city of Lviv.
You can learn about our students’ projects here.
We would like to congratulate all members of the program for sharing their work with our audience and each other. In the spirit of “Navigating Change – New Solutions” each participant contributed their expertise, time and unique way of looking at the world to the program – an openness that is invaluable in order to achieve the learning curve and results we witnessed over the course of the year. Here is how a participant summarizes their time in the annual program:
"Participating in the annual School for Talents program was a highlight of my academic year. Finally being able to explore the variety of topics I am interested in, beyond the borders of my course of study, with like-minded and motivated peers was something I hoped for and experienced. I loved the spirit and the nature of the program for encouraging debates and arguments from different perspectives, rather than feeling constrained by expectations to be knowledgeable in your own subjects and stay within these realms."