Newsmail #93, 2024-05-03

Dear all,

On my visit at UPV, the technical University in Valencia, Spain, I met with the international managers to discuss exchange of students. UPV provides a nice environment, close to the Mediterranean beach, nice food etc. It turned out that they receive mainly students from the Energy dept at KTH, which surprised me. One take away from that is that I think we should define a strategy for internationalization of our MSc-programs at MMK, define key partnerships, propose double degree or dual master program agreements and other forms of collaboration. This is something to consider for the future.

Yesterday I spent the entire day on work environment training, to understand roles and responsibilities regarding our environment. We have come quite far, as I mentioned last week, regarding our ISO 14000-certification, but, if I compare with the now regular pulse surveys we do, we still have quite a lot to do regarding our psychosocial environment. The unit managers will take the same training the coming weeks, so we’ll discuss actions together afterwards.

Today I met with all heads of schools and departments to discuss and brainstorm around what we call the SUHF-model, the model KTH (and most universities in Sweden) use to define and separate costs between overhead costs and other costs. There is a very strong push now to lower the overhead costs at KTH, so, to start with understanding, analyzing the current model, to be able to simulate, tweak and propose changes seems like the natural way forward (for an academic person). There are lot of ideas and suggestions on how to lower the costs and the percentages, more or less creative, and I was happy to see that we have come so far in this work in our school compared to others.

Now I wish everyone a nice weekend in the sun.

Best,

Martin