The WASP program is situated in an internationally fast-moving area and the international dimension is therefore inherent in the program. There are thus two mandatory international study visits offered during the PhD student’s time in WASP.
The first trip targets an interesting location in Europe and the second reaches further abroad. For example, North America and Asia have a large number of highly relevant sites to visit for WASP students. The trips often include both university and company visits.
Grounding of a Career Journey
The study visits allow the participants to discover and connect with research groups of interest. A suitable occasion to ground for a stint abroad or a future postdoctoral scholarship. Apart from external contacts, the networking within the WASP PhD student group itself is an important goal of these trips.
Except the centrally organized trips, the graduate school students are also encouraged to arrange their own study visits abroad with funding from WASP. Often these trips are arranged in smaller groups and in the later years of the PhD period.
Study trip to Hawaii
In July 2023, a group of WASP PhD students went on a study trip to Honolulu, Hawaii, in conjunction with the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2023. The trip commenced with a seminar day with invited speakers from SigOpt and AI Sweden, and presentations by the PhD students.
Study Visit to Germany
The first batch of students from the WASP-AI graduate school went for a weeklong study trip to Germany in the autumn 2019. There they visited two universities, RWTH Aachen University and Technical University Darmstadt, and one large research institute, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.