Jana Vyrastekova

You have to ask questions, allow them to participate in your study, also make them aware that they are part of the research.

So that brings a lot of extra questions, and that's why maybe people don't do it all the time.

But yeah, intervening early is definitely extremely crucial, and we have actually also shown it with our program.

We have shown that if you approach people with a very clear message,

Do you need more connection?

Do you look for your social environment?

And it's not there in the academic field where you work.

Maybe you need to connect across other academic fields.

So we opened up the program across the whole university, and we indeed saw that people who joined the program systematically differed from our control group, which was just a random sample from the university.

So one of the things that we wanted to include is to bring role models.

to bring these academic top shots and show to the students that they are also human and that instead of only having this top academic performance, sometimes, you know, approaching Nobel Prizes and having high positions at the university, rectors and so on,

These people actually from inside also experience uncertainties, also sometimes don't feel fully connected.

So we just said, okay, we take the role models, we let them talk to the students on an even basis, you know, without the hierarchy, and we will focus on what makes us human and, you know, make it visible in these interactions with students.

So that was one of the things that we did in the program, these plenary meetings with top shot speakers and students who voluntarily joined the meetings, but speaking not about hierarchical positions, but speaking about how to make human connections.

Yeah, definitely.

Yes, definitely.

So the first thing was that we met three, four times in this kind of plenary context with the role models meetings.

And after each such a big meeting, we also had smaller meetings with the students where they could...

talk and chat freely with the other participants.

And we started building in a little bit, you could call it like a scaffolding.