The Agenda

Presentations

The BEST Student Recognition Event lasted 3 days. The agenda was mainly dedicated to presentations by various people related to IBM: Human Resource managers, consultants, software engineers and researchers.

The first day, we had presentations about Poland and Krakow as a welcome then we were told about the IBM Smarter Planet initiative with a focus on the Traffic management system in Stockhlom designed and implemented by IBM.

The next day, there was a presentation about job and internship opportunities at IBM.

We went to the IBM software development in Krakow where we could see some software working. IBM engineers were excited to answer to questions by students.

During the afternoon, we had presentations about supercomputers, their architecture and their applications, beginning in fundamental science then used to improve mainframe computers.

Innovation strategy at IBM was then presented. We saw how this corporation gather information from different sources, scientists, managers and citizens.

Eventually, two students freshly hired by IBM explained their integration in the Krakow's lab.

On the final day, we had a quiz about the presentations of the two previous days. The best team won a Nintendo Wii, that has a processor developped by IBM, for each member of the team.

Non academic activities

During the evenings, we enjoyed the beautiful city of Krakow with great medieval neighborhoods. We went to a salt mine in Wieliczka where, after a guided tour, we had a dinner at several hundreds of meters deep ! More about Wieliczka salt mine here.

The atmosphere of the event was very pleasant, the people working for IBM were friendly and we had good relationships with the other international students present there.