A summer greeting from the school management
Suddenly it has become June and the summer heat is here. The spring semester that just passed has gone by incredibly quickly. That it feels like spring rushed by has its explanations. Together we at the ABE school have namely put in a great deal of work, accomplished much, and achieved very fine results.
ABE school's researchers have continued to be successful in applying for external research funding and have been granted funding from both broad financiers like Formas and more specialized ones like Smart Built Environment. The school's researchers have also been rewarded with prizes, including for literature, for lifetime achievement, and for environmental research.
The school's researchers have also been frequently visible in the media. This has included, among many other things, wind turbines and blasting, waste and packaging, deposits on cans and mortage deeds, living space, housing prices and empty offices, climate adaptation, trains and airplanes, bridges and drones, snow and skiing, electric scooters and public transport, AI and antiquity, crime and consumption, nuclear power and boastful buildings, Hemnet, gynecological chairs, bicycles and a donkey.
ABE school has made an investment in six new doctoral students within digitalization and sustainability who have been employed in a school-wide initiative and who all have supervisors from two different departments. It is an important investment that we chose to finance with agency capital. The interest has been enormous with up to 200 applicants for some of the positions. Selecting the six doctoral students has been a pleasant problem.
Together with Företagsekonomiska Institutet, we offer contract education for real estate agents that is highly sought after. With 200 participants, it makes us Sweden's largest educator in real estate brokerage.
The situation in the world has meant that interest from international students to come to KTH has increased. For example, we have never had as many paying students from Indonesia as now. For the autumn, a record number of 185 Indonesian applicants have been admitted.
That KTH has been reorganized so that teacher appointments are now handled by local faculty boards has worked very well, collegial influence has been strengthened and created opportunities for strategic conversations. With that said, we still have things that can be improved. For example, we still struggle with long recruitment times. But we are aware of the problem and continue to work to shorten them.
We have implemented facility changes according to plan, work that continues during the autumn, and the ABE school has a balanced economy, which is the result of hard work in all parts of the school.
With that summary behind us, we can all slow down, enter summer mode and take a vacation that will do us good and that we are all very well deserving of.
Happy summer!
Björn & Karin