A completed PhD project makes one a true expert on some well or not so well defined area of research. Several years of hard, independent work is eventually tested by writing up a bulky thesis and defending it in a viva. This is demanding and fun hard core education. Graduate life however offers many more exciting things to try and skills to learn.

I just discovered one untapped source of fun and challenge by attending the Enterprisers 2008 programme organised by the Cambridge-MIT Institute in Cambridge at the Judge Business School.

In short, Enterprisers is an intense 4-day course that teaches enterpreneurial thinking, team working skills, and gives plenty of chances for networking (as in drinking beer) with other students and new enterpreneurs. This year it happened to be run in Cambridge, but is unlikely to return here in the near future.

By attending the course you learn among other things answers to questions like "What role do you take naturally when presented with a hard task in an unknown group of people?" or "How do you adapt your role when you find out more about the group?" You also learn techniques to force creative thinking out of a group, and of course meet a whole lot of fun and smart people working on anything from philosophy to engineering to particle physics. You might also get some grasp of how to start building your own hazy business idea (surely everybody has one or two?) into something a little bit more realistic.

For those of you studying in Cambridge, I honestly recommend attending events and courses that the Cambridge-MIT Institute and the Centre for Enterpreneurial Learning organise. Among the things they run regularly are the termly i-Teams projects (student-run market research projects on new high-tech business ideas) and the Enterprise Tuesdays (a weekly lecture + networking event).