The Zürich School of Crystallography 2015

Given the fact that several Croatian crystallographers attended the ZSC in past years, it has a somewhat famous status among the Croatian crystallographic community. When applying for the school I had no doubt in my mind that it would be an intense course, maybe even exhausting at times, but definitely worthwhile. All of my expectations were met.

So far in my laboratory I have been preparing crystals and using solved crystal structures in my work, but it has always been someone else doing the measurement and solving the structure for me. Due to its complexity, single-crystal analysis never seemed to be an easy technique to master and even though one can use the software just by clicking the buttons and not worrying about what is in the black box, it is still not trivial. Having completed the ZSC course, I now feel confident about performing the analysis myself and I am sure I will be able to recognize and solve problems I find.

The course was a well-organized mix of lectures and tutorials given by ten tutors, all of whom were very helpful, friendly and always ready to answer any of the students’ questions. At the end of each day we had a half-hour student session where students gave their feedback on the day and could ask for certain topics to be covered again or programme modifications made. Practical sessions involved learning about how to measure, solve and refine crystal structures. As the students came from many different fields of chemical research and had different methods for solving crystal structures, I found it was very useful for all to learn through solving not only prepared example structures but also their own structures of present crystalline compounds.

The course also included a visit to the Paul Scherrer Institute and the Swiss Light Source with a demonstration of a single-crystal measurement on one of our own crystals, which allowed us to see up close how it all works; to our amazement, the measurement took only six minutes.

Apart from the lectures, the social component of the school was just wonderful. Students and tutors socialized at every breakfast, lunch break and dinner. There was also a barbecue that was a lot of fun and a great dinner party at a Chinese restaurant at the very end of the course. I thought it was wonderful to have so many different people from all around the world getting along so well and enjoying their time together.

To conclude, I think the ZSC is definitely worthwhile. In one of his review papers, Peter Müller wrote that a crystallographer’s training is similar to that of a Jedi Knight, where practical knowledge passes down from the master’s mouth to the apprentice’s ear and is not something easily learned from a textbook. I believe that ZSC with its intensity and two students per tutor ratio definitely provided the students with the most important tricks of the trade; all the students need to do now is solve structures and gain their own experience.

The next School is scheduled for June 2017.