The Summer School is built around six settings that recur throughout each cohort. The first five are deliberately old-fashioned in shape — a lecture in the morning, a workshop in the afternoon, a seminar with an invited guest in the evening. The sixth is a five-day hackathon at the end, in which everything taught is put to use on a single project, judged in public.
The aim is to give participants the rhythm of a small graduate school for three weeks — and then a working week of pressure — and, in the chen.ist Academy tradition, to send them home with skills they can use on Monday morning rather than a certificate they will never open.
How the four weeks build on each other
| Week | What is taught |
|---|---|
| Week 1 | Cybersecurity foundations · Cyber hygiene · Cyber awareness |
| Week 2 | Open source — tools, ecosystem, contribution |
| Week 3 | Project management · Public speaking — applied to a security brief |
| Week 4 | Hackathon: build, defend, present in front of an external jury |
Each week is structured so that the next week needs it: the open-source tooling in week 2 is what teams use in the hackathon; the project management and public speaking in week 3 is rehearsed against the brief they will present in week 4.
The six settings
1. Theoretical foundations
Morning lectures in which a member of faculty or invited researcher works through the principles, the recent literature and the open questions in a particular area. Lecture notes are circulated in advance; readings are kept short and well-chosen.
2. Hands-on workshops
Small-group practical sessions in the afternoon, run by a workshop lead and one or two assistants drawn from the alumni network. Each workshop ends with a written reflection circulated to the whole cohort. In weeks 1–2, workshops also include a guided phishing simulation and an open-source contribution made by every participant.
3. Group projects
Each participant joins a project team of four to six people on the first day of the programme; the same team carries through to the hackathon. Earlier-week project sessions are used to scope, plan and threat-model the hackathon brief — so the team that walks into week 4 already has a plan, a backlog, and a shared understanding of what good looks like.
4. Guest lectures and panels
Two evenings each week are reserved for invited speakers — researchers, practitioners, journalists, founders, civil servants, members of the Romanian cybersecurity community. Conversations are on the record but unrecorded, so that speakers can be candid.
5. Rehearsal and feedback
Public speaking is treated as a skill, not an aside. Every participant gives at least four short talks during the school: a Tuesday lightning talk, a Friday workshop write-up, a project status review, and the hackathon presentation. Talks are recorded; the recording, plus a brief review with a faculty member, is part of the curriculum.
6. The closing hackathon
The fourth week is a five-day hackathon. Teams take a realistic defensive brief, ship a working project, contribute upstream where it makes sense, and defend their work in a public talk and Q&A in front of an external jury. The hackathon is not a contest for prizes — it is the school’s final exam, and it is where most of the lasting learning actually happens.
Networking and social time
The Friday colloquium dinner, the Saturday excursions and the unstructured evenings on campus are part of the curriculum, not extras. Most of what participants take away from the school comes from one another.
What participants are expected to bring
- A laptop capable of running a current Linux virtual machine.
- A short piece of preparatory reading, circulated before the programme.
- A willingness to work in a small group on a single problem for four weeks, ending with a public presentation.
Assessment
There is no formal grading. The hackathon presentation, in front of the external jury, is the school’s only public assessment; written feedback from the jury is shared with each team afterwards. Certificates of completion are issued on the final day; transcripts and contact-hour documentation are available on request for participants seeking academic credit at their home institution.