We started the first day by sharing our experiences during the seconds, with a total of 10 of the Butterflies giving a short talk about their academic or industrial seconds. It was very engaging to both share highlights, as well as acknowledge some challenges along the way and learn from each other. The day continued with some workshops about working more efficiently and setting priorities, followed by a brainstorm session on open science. We concluded the day with a social activity where we did an escape room in the city of Utrecht, allowing us to both explore the city and solve different murder mysteries!

The second day was an interesting mix of scientific talks given by some of our group leaders, panel discussions about the ethics of informed consent and workshops on green labs and on the topic of mental health. The scientific talks showed nicely how research can be translated into care and how this is done in our research hospital. With a very diverse group of Butterfly students working on different levels along this line of translational research, this was a very interesting session showing us what is needed in research to make it applicable to care for patients. The panel discussion about informed consent allowed us to discuss this topic with experts in the field. Any questions we had about informed consent in general, and how it is applied in our hospital could be addressed. During the green labs workshop, we prepared short pitches on how to use AI more sustainable in our research and made some suggestions for improvement. The workshop about preventing burnout and how to cope with stress gave us some helpful insights on how to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

Overall, this autumn school succeeded in providing a very diverse range of topics, while still being interesting and applicable for all of us.