From Oct 16, 2023 to Dec 20, 2023, Lund University hosted a hybrid course in Entrepreneurial skills as part of the course offering of the European University Alliance for Global Health (EUGLOH). The format – called a “hackathon” – entailed developing a business idea that improves global health, with solutions that should be both workable and creative. The course brought together 43 students from seven of the nine EUGLOH partners in Lund and resulted in a total of 7 unique solutions to the challenge.
The course started out online, with the participants carrying out individual work. “At other hackathons that I have attended in the past, it was just the project and nothing else. Here, we were actually provided with tools beforehand, which made the whole experience way better because people were synced in how to do the project”, said James Rowntree, a student at Université Paris-Saclay.
At the end of the course, the students got to gather in Lund to participate in a two-day in-person hackathon event. In teams, the participants worked on a solution to the challenge they were given. A jury evaluated the proposed solutions and selected winning teams. Among the solutions, one team suggested shared living between students and the elderly, preventing loneliness. The winning team suggested an app to keep track of one’s latest antibiotics prescription to prevent the misuse of antibiotics and ultimately antibiotics resistance.
The participants pointed out that they enjoyed meeting fellow students from other cultures and how interesting it was to see how different cultures approach similar issues. Lehman Benson Jr., a student from the Swedish-taught law programme at Lund University, said that he “really enjoyed the experience of meeting people from different cultures and doing something like this together, especially since there are not so many international students in my programme”.