Tutors – King's College London Summer Programmes

January 25, 2019

Calling all computer science students

Some exciting news to begin 2019 is the launch of the new Software Performance Engineering (SPE) two week short-course. Based on real-world industrial case studies, students will study three aspects of SPE:

The theoretical foundations of software performance: how to model, test, analyse, and predict it;
Tool support helping model and analyse the performance of new software products; and
Methodological considerations, especially how to integrate a systematic SPE discipline into modern-day agile development practices.

We spoke with SPE Senior Lecturer, Dr. Steffen Zschaler, from the Department of Informatics at King’s College London who expressed his excitement about the course.

‘Software is ever more important to every aspect of our lives. Issues with software performance can have huge impacts on people’s lives—for example, people have had their wedding plans thrown into disarray because failure of card-payment software system meant they couldn’t pay providers. Still, we continue to see reports of new high-level failures at a regular rate. Join us to learn how you can apply a systematic performance engineering process to avoid many of these problems in your own software development.’

Applicants should be current Computer Science students who have completed at least one year of study. The programme will run for two weeks, from 1-12 July and it is an opportunity for students interested in this field to further develop their knowledge.

Do you want to know more? Please visit our website for more information about the programme.

July 12, 2018July 13, 2018

From London to Hong Kong

We flew from London to Hong Kong to bring a unique teaching experience to students at our hosting school, Singapore International School (Hong Kong). Here are some highlights of an inspiring week.

Students were introduced to the British way of teaching and they explored a range of subject areas, such as Biomedical Sciences, Business Management, Chemistry, Law, Politics and Engineering.

It was a great opportunity for them to have an international experience in their own country, and some of the students got excited with the idea of studying abroad in the future.

Professors returned fully inspired by the bright and motivated students that they met and came back with good memories.

Students attended special sessions on the British university application process delivered by our deputy director, Ian Fielding.

For more information on our pre-university summer programmes, please check our website.

August 2, 2016

Undergraduate Summer School Law Careers Panels

Students at Law Panel During Session One of the Undergraduate Summer School we offered, for the first time, a number of informative law career panels to some of our students. With the collaboration of the Careers and Employability service at King’s, we were able to invite a whole host of interesting professionals to speak with our students about different career paths for law students.

Dr Alexander Heinz, Senior Tutor for the Summer Programmes team felt that, “the career panels were much enjoyed by the students… panel members and the students had engaging conversations about career paths and were highly interested in receiving advice from representatives of a range of legal professions.”

In Session One our law students were treated to an exciting panel facilitated by Professor Alexander Türk. He is Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes and is also Director of the Postgraduate Diploma/MA in EU Law (by Distance Learning). Additionally Professor Türk is General Editor of LexisNexis EU Tracker.

Professor Türk was joined on this panel by Dr Nigel Spencer a Global Director of Learning and Development at international law firm Reed Smith LLP and Abdullah El Maghraby a Second-Seat Trainee at Baker & Mckenzie, sitting in the Banking department. Two King’s College London Alumni also joined the panel. Jenny Galloway is an Associate in a Financial Services Litigation team and Daniel Jacobs is a Trainee Solicitor at Norton Rose Fulbright.

law career panel

The law careers panel in Session Two was facilitated by Professor Eva Lomnicka from the King’s College London Dickson Poon School of Law. Eva Lomnicka obtained an MA and LLB from Cambridge University, qualified as a barrister and then came to King’s as a lecturer in 1975.

Professor Lomnicka was joined on the panel by Sarah Thorner, a Legal and Business Affairs Executive at Fremantle Media, who spoke about what her experience of being a lawyer in the media industry. Also on the panel was King’s alumni and Associate at Freshfields, Tom Hingley, who spoke about what it is like working in intellectual property law. Imogen Holmgren and Lucy Crittenden, both from Reed Smith, joined the law panel. Imogen is an Associate at the company and discussed her role working on private equity transactions & M&A agreements. Lucy decided that she wanted to focus her career on people development, so she’s now a graduate Recruitment Manager at Reed Smith.

These career panels were a great way for students studying EU Law, International Commercial Law and Criminology and Criminal Justice to ask professionals real career advice about their chosen fields. And if you are thinking about studying Law at King’s College London next summer please see our website.

June 6, 2016June 1, 2016

The EU In/Out Referendum

This blog entry takes a critical look at the UK in/out referendum on the European Union, now a mere six weeks away, through the lens of Political Science. Questions about the meaning of security and sovereignty are raised, offering a measured review of expectations and outcomes. The blog shows the breadth of the referendum question and allows the curious mind to glimpse more behind the grinding rhetoric of the opposing campaign sides.

May 9, 2016May 23, 2016

What is great about teaching on the Summer School?

Untitled The Summer School should be fun. But also achieve interpersonal growth and fire up passion for higher education. Still further, amidst the busy lives of young people, it should bring about such outcomes with speed and panache; most certainly, it should be a substantive variation on information available via Wiki, FB, Twitter, et cetera. So, what is it like to teach faced with such challenges?

I teach Politics and International Relations and my experience has shown that the humanities encourage creativity. I still want students to read without worry they’d be called nerds if they do so also over the summer. A vital tool of Summer School teaching is the practice of the subject. My students partake in daily strategy games, such as negotiations and simulations, like the United Nations Security Council Reform Group; international trade games; smart city building exercises, and the rest.

My own expertise is key to inspiring and supporting creativity. It comes from constantly researching the subject matter of political science. A great enabler of this is seeing students as a lively focus group that literally takes the pulse of the course through their seminal comments and feedback. Because I teach international students in London and then also take Politics and IR ‘on the road’ to India, my students cover between them a substantive portion of the globe and bring together a myriad of views and expectations. Making sense of the world is about acquiring a key skill, which is the ability to separate information from knowledge. One of the most memorable sayings I heard, whilst lecturing in India, was: “Google cannot find your slippers in the Temple” (which in Hindi translates into something like: Google Apni Chappal Mandir Se Nahi Dhoond sakta.) Indeed, my students often find that social media is a phenomenal way to exchange beacons, whilst the Summer School enables the connection of a great series of these to create a whole and gain a different (critical!) understanding of the world altogether.

In my next entry, I will offer a practical example of this, focusing on the forthcoming UK in/out EU referendum, now only weeks away!

September 29, 2015September 29, 2015

Art of Leadership: ‘Leaders aren’t born; they are made’

Leaders aren’t born; they are made. The Art of Leadership provided students with an exciting, hands-on approach to leading. It interactively engaged students to develop their leadership potential with innovative lessons and challenges.

During lectures, the course explored core leadership concepts such as the distinction between leadership and authority, adaptive challenge/work, as well as transactional and transformational leadership. The most stimulating part, however, was applying critical leadership skills, including problem solving and decision-making, emotional intelligence, communication, and strategic action to real world situations. The students had to be prepared for challenges at any moment!

For instance, they were thrown into hot water and tasked to design and mobilize teams. They learned how to advance their interests strategically and to utilize networks. And they received a glimpse into manifold challenges and the dangers of leading.

The course focused on business leadership and beyond, drawing on case studies from politics, sports, the military, and the non-profit sector. Class interactions were also an integral and memorable part of the programme.

R.H. John Gummer Lord Deben addressing the class.

These interactions often took the students outside the classroom. We visited the Churchill War Rooms and Britain’s retail giant Marks & Spencer. Moreover, we welcomed several guests to the course who openly shared their leadership experiences and passed on their wisdom of what has and hasn’t worked for them.

Leading consists of more than just delivering results. As such, we also allocated substantial time for students to reflect on their personal motivation, drives, abilities, and skills.

After three weeks in the course, the students agreed they were departing with useful skills for their academic and professional future and a clearer picture of how to lead. Furthermore, they were instilled with a better understanding about themselves and who they aspire to be.

Mark T. Fliegauf

May 1, 2015

Shakespeare in London

During the reign of Elizabeth I, London was at the centre of a burgeoning literary and theatrical culture whose influence is still felt to this day. William Shakespeare made the journey from Stratford-upon-Avon some time in the 1580s and became a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later the King’s Men; their principal playwright by the time the first Globe Theatre was completed in 1599. Across the river from the main commercial city, the Globe was a centre for entertainment alongside the bear-baiting pits and brothels of the Southwark ‘Liberties,’ but the theatre was also a place for a wide range of contemporary concerns to be disseminated and explored: the power structures of the Tudor and Stuart monarchies, the early forays of colonialism, nascent capitalism, shifting gender politics and the aftershocks of decades of religious conflict.

Today, Shakespeare’s influence is still felt in London: from the genteel Victorian theatres of the West End, where famous actors such as David Garrick, Edmund Kean, Henry Irving and Ellen Terry made their names with iconic interpretations of Shakespeare’s characters, to the National Theatre established in the 1960s where the relationship of Shakespeare to British identity is still being negotiated, to the reconstructed Globe theatre a stone’s throw from the theatre’s original location. At the Globe, modern audiences can encounter Shakespeare in an approximation of its original form. In 2014 the new Sam Wanamaker Theatre opened: a Jacobean-style indoor playhouse where candlelit performances of plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries take place in conditions similar to those of the earliest indoor playhouses.

The Shakespeare in London course at King’s is an opportunity to explore both: the historic context of Shakespeare’s work in early modern London and the long shadow of his continuing influence on the modern city. We will attend a variety of performances: Elizabethan-style performance at the Globe and contemporary adaptations, taking advantage of the varied theatrical landscape that London has to offer. We will trace the remnants of Shakespeare’s city in contemporary Southwark and the evidence of his later influence elsewhere in the city. Lectures will provide background and explore three of his plays in some detail, both in their original context and in subsequent adaptations, and interactive seminar discussions will explore issues related to these texts, including gender, genre, politics and religion. We will discuss the ways that these plays communicate the major political and social concerns of their era, and consider the ways that their meanings have been deployed, inverted or appropriated in four hundred years of performance. This year, the plays we focus on will be Twelfth Night, As You Like It and Macbeth.

Join us in London for an in-depth engagement with Shakespeare in the city that made him famous. For more information visit http://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/summer/programmes/undergraduatesummerschool/modules/kingsculturallondon/Shakespeare-in-London.aspx

Please feel free to contact us with any questions at sarah.barnden@kcl.ac.uk and miranda.thomas@kcl.ac.uk

We look forward to working with you in July.

Sally Barnden and Miranda Fay Thomas

Tutors

April 17, 2015

Global Energy Politics

The course provides insights into international politics in general (main mechanisms, theories and concepts) and into the field of international energy politics in particular. We will study a wide variety of actors involved in energy policy-making: states (energy importers, energy exporters and transit states), intergovernmental organisations, industry, NGOs; the formal and informal connections between these actors and the outcome of their interaction on the global stage. We will engage with issues such as energy security, the geopolitics of energy, conflict over natural resources, the curse of natural resources in resource rich developing countries, as well as the politics of climate change and their implications for global energy policy.

Renewable Energy Solar Panels in Tokelau; Copyright: United Nations Photo/ Ariane Rummery

The course includes lectures on cutting-edge topics and interactive seminars. During this course, learning will take place in a very direct and hands on manner. You will meet with representatives of the corporate, non-profit and governmental energy sector and get the chance to ask them questions about their work and their expertise areas. The schedule includes a visit to an energy production facility, as well as a dynamic two-day simulation of political climate change negotiations. This will allow you to place yourselves in the shoes of top policy makers and attempt to solve some of the biggest challenges of our time: increasing pollution, energy resources scarcity and climate change.

UN Climate Change Conference in Doha; Copyright: United Nations Photo/ Mark Garten

You can find more information about the course at: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/study/summer/programmes/undergraduatesummerschool/modules/Kingslegallondon/Global-Energy-Politics.aspx

Do drop me a line if you have any questions at amb225@cam.ac.uk. I would love to hear from you.

I am looking forward to meeting you and working with you in July.

Alexandra M Bocse, Course Tutor

April 29, 2014

GLOBAL GOVERNANCE: INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATIONS IN CRISIS

One only needs follow some of the ongoing ping-pong between the Americans and the Russians regarding Ukraine to understand how defunct International Organisations are and how present the role of the state is. A few questions have arisen with renewed strength and added to a long line of enquiry, such as:

– What is the purpose of the United Nations?
– Why is NATO still around when the Cold War is well over?
– How much can the European Union achieve without hard power (that is an European army of some shape)?

I tend to support those arguing that a globalised and strongly interdependent world cannot rely on the role of nation states alone and that strong International Organisations have a pivotal role to play. In the first instance, they ensure that smaller states are represented, whereas if we lived in condition of anarchy, only the strongest states would benefit. Secondly, in negotiating treaties and treaty reforms, International Organisations can balance out the interests of weaker states against those of hegemonic such. This is especially relevant to better (scarce) resource allocation and distribution in order to attain larger objectives, such as poverty eradication, global health outreach, global access to education, and greater gender equality, cultural, ethnic and religious tolerance. Precisely the reforms required of International Organizations in order to better respond to such challenges are studied in depth in the Summer School course ‘Global Governance: International Organisations in Crisis’. We focus squarely on key institutions, which are however dated in the context of the new millennium. The United Nations is a prime candidate for reform by unanimous consent. Founded on the principle of inclusion at the end of the Second World War, its present fabric is no longer consistent with the shift in power East and South. In the fourth wave of globalisation, which we are living through today, we ask the following questions amongst others: Is the Security Council viable? Under what conditions may either of India, Brazil, Germany or Japan gain a seat? Is Ukraine a testimony to the return of hegemonic stability or symptomatic of the emergence of a new global order about which we know very little? What is the place of regional organisations, such as the European Union in this?

London is uniquely suited to exploring such topical issues, being the seat of a vibrant diplomatic community and many think-tanks dedicated to research and debate of these key themes. It further houses the headquarters of the United Nations IMO, which students will have the opportunity to visit. Furthermore, it is in close proximity to those international organisations and institutions situated in Paris (OECD) and Brussels (EU). In previous years the course has undertaken trips to Paris and Brussels.

Dr. Diana Bozhilova AKC
Visiting Research Fellow
Centre for Hellenic Studies
Tutor, Summer School and International Programmes
King’s College London
Strand WC2R 2LS

March 22, 2013May 10, 2013

Meet the tutors: Katharine O’Reilly

Interested in learning more about a particular course? Who better to talk to than the tutor in charge! This week, Katharine O’Reilly, the tutor for Ancient Philosophy, tells us a little more about her course and why London is the perfect setting for it.

‘One of the real advantages of studying Ancient Philosophy at King’s College London is that this city is a hub for the discipline – in addition to the course, there are talks by scholars, and other events, nearly every day.

We’re also so lucky to have the British Museum on our doorstep, and during the course we make a trip to see the Greek collection, and usually have a talk from an expert. This last year we were lucky enough to have Sam Moorhead speak to us about a new interpretation of the Elgin Marbles. Experiences like that transport us back to the cultural surroundings in which the philosophers we study flourished.

One of the aims with which the course was designed is to bring out the very practical consequences of doing philosophy. For the Ancient Greeks this was obvious: the philosophical school you were part of, and the conclusions you agreed with, dictated your life choices. Philosophy was a lived discipline. One of the wonderful things about the Summer School is that for many students studying away from their usual surroundings, joining this new community is a chance to do some self-reflection. Studying the Ancient Greek philosophers is a chance to use their work to help inform your thinking about your life, and for some that experience will be transformative.

In addition to doing close reading of ancient texts, and debating the issues therein, we also look at modern writing which attempts to answer some of the same questions. This unique format means that in a short time, we not only get to grips with how to understand and evaluate philosophical arguments, we also get to trace the intellectual history of an idea up to the present debate. As a skill set to walk away with, this has some of the widest applications.

The key questions we look at include some of philosophy’s most essential problems: Are the events of tomorrow already decided today? Can anyone ever really know anything? What is happiness, and is it different than pleasure? What is justice, and what do we owe each other? In class we’re interested in understanding what answers that ancient and modern philosophers have given to these questions, but we’re also interested in being critical of their arguments, and considering our own answers to the philosophical puzzles raised. Seeing students find their own voice in these central debates is always exciting.

Now that spring has arrived in London I’m very excited that this year’s Summer School is approaching. I invite you all to come and wonder with the ancients, and discover why the whole history of philosophy is merely ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’.

You can watch a short introductory video of Katharine chatting about her course here.