We had the greatest pleasure of hosting a networking event at Y Science – an official side event of Slush 2018 for the Life Sciences.
Slush is well known as the biggest startup conference in the Nordics. This year they teamed up with HiLIFE from the University of Helsinki to organise a large gathering of entrepreneurs and scientists from all over the world to inspire more science-based business initiatives.
The three-day Y Science festival, in downtown Helsinki, aimed to bring the scientific community and the business world together for generating world-changing ideas. Y Science has everything you could dream of for a networking event: a street party with a DJ and dancers, a cool matchmaking app, high quality talks, exhibitions, poster sessions and a restaurant get-together hosted by yours truly – The Science Basement.
Figure 1. The Science Basement team at Y Science: Katja Viivi , Lea Urpa , Ekaterina Baibuz , Chiara Facciotto (from left to right)
Those who arrived in Helsinki on December 3rd were invited to the wonderful venue, Kiila restaurant in the centre of Helsinki, where the members of The Science Basement were waiting for them with some light networking program. Our activities included Networking Bingo and a Y-science quiz.
Networking Bingo (Figure 2) proved to be a great opportunity to meet new people, learn their names and occupations, and win some sweet prizes. Our participants didn’t need much encouragement – they are the Slush crowd after all – and the winners were quickly identified with the cheerful shout of “Bingo!”.
Figure 2. Networking Bingo! (click to enlarge)
The Y Science Quiz (Figure 3) gave a sneak peak of what was going to be covered in the upcoming talks at the main event on December 5th. Even though people hadn’t heard the talks yet, several teams managed to correctly guess the answers to the questions. The winning team was awarded with chocolate boxes.
Figure 3. Y Science quiz (click to enlarge)
Many amazing people joined our gathering and we hope that our networking programme helped the participants to get into the spirit of Y Science!