Application to the School

Applications to the school has been opened since September 2001 up to 30 November 2001. Applications are no longer accepted.

Selection conditions

The school is opened to a maximum of 50 participants from any country and any nationality. However since, the school is mainly sponsored by the European Union, the selection of the attendants was based on the following criteria: We expect to cover as much as possible the financial cost for all European participants (housing and travel) by requesting support from European institutions (ESO, ESA,...) and various institutes within Europe so that the availability of financial resources at a given institute does not impact the participation to the school.

List of selected participants

We have received a total of 103 applications. 54 persons have been selected to participate to the school and 10 are on a waiting list.

Selection process

We describe here how we have achieved the selection. The repartition in the original list between the different countries, the different communities and the different age was rather well balanced. We concluded that if we could cut down by a factor two in each categories, one could get a well balanced participant list. Since more than 80% of the applicants were younger than 35 years, we did not used the age criterion (the goal to reach first young people was already achieved). We applied the following criteria:
  1. Reading the VLTI Projects of each applicants together with the selected scientifica activity and his/her astrophysical interests, we have been able to sort the list in two categories: (i) the category A for whom the astrophysical projects are relatively clear and realistic compared to the performance of the first generation instruments of the VLTI, and, (ii) the category B for which either the VLTI projects are not defined or too general. We had too be strict in the definition of the VLTI project in order to decrease the number of persons. Since we organized this school mainly for the prime observers of the VLTI, the persons interested uniquely by the instrumentation point of view have been less favored. But giving the pressure factor greater than 2, we felt this was the right decision (we think that one should also organize quickly general training in interferometry to educate the young Europeans on this aspect). This classification has been done regardless of the origin of the applicant. We got 64 persons in group A and 40 in group B.
  2. We then looked at the origin of the persons in group A in terms of nationalities. This is an important step that is required since we are funded by the European Commission (anybody who has dealt with EC knows about this aspect). We gave positive and negative bonuses to people for which the ratio of the country differed from the one of the inital list of participants.
  3. We applied the same methodology as in previous paragraph for the criteria of astrophysical domains.
  4. We added the bonuses and obtained for each participant a total of points, positive or negative, allowing to compare the different profiles. We then went through the list sorted by order of institutes (ie. including personels from different nationalities) and discriminated between several candidates from the same institutes. Of course, we took also into account the original number of applicants by institute to correct from any deviation effect.
Finally we obtained a list of 54 names from the group A. We thought it was too difficult to go further in the selection and we will therefore accomodate 4 additional participants. The 10 persons that have not been selected in the last step will be kept on the waiting list in case anybody from the main list cannot come.

Here are some statistics on the applications received.

Science activity

Countries of nationality and residence

88% of the applicants are persons from Europe Member States or Associated States.


Miscellaneous information

The applicants are in general young (82% below 35), beginners (70%) or intermediate (21%) in interferometry and in majority at junior level (80%) ie students or a few years after graduation.



 

In case of problem, please contact: obsvlti@laog.obs.ujf-grenoble.fr