I recently attended the almost two week summer school organized by Bocconi, in collaboration with the StatML CDT. It was one of the best experiences in my PhD so far! The official name for the 2022 edition was “Random structures and combinational statistics”, or as it was described to us on the first day, “Random stuff”. The first week was taught by Gabor Lugosi, and it related to concentration inequalities, and by the end we we had an introduction to random graphs and the hidden clique problem. The second week was taught by Luc Devroye, where we explored random graphs and trees in far more detail. It was more theoretical than what I am usually used to in my PhD, but it was great fun nonetheless! I particularly enjoyed that it reminded me of my undergraduate degree, but this time the class room was a lot more beautiful:

In addition to the lectures, it was very enjoyable to spend two weeks living around Lake Como! The everyday walk from the hotel to the Villa was particularly beautiful (even if, at times, it was too hot!). We spend most of our evenings exploring the city, trying all types of Italian food, and spending time with the other amazing students from the summer school, I think we all made life-time friends! Highly recommend attending if you ever have the opportunity!