Same role, different responsibilities

As the Head of the Environmental Lecture Series1 at the Technical University of Munich (TUM)2, I had a strategic role to fulfil once elected as a Representative by the student council. However, this position also requires a level of operational complexity that goes beyond volunteer efforts, and for that reason, the university formally contracts the organizers in charge of running the lecture series. It was with joy that I became a Student Assistant at the TUM Social Sciences and Technology Department joining the Kontextlehre team. This department supported us in managing the platform course and dealing with procedures related to institutional policies, such as speaker travel reimbursements, as well as a crucial part of managing a course that offers ECTS credits to students: designing and implementing the structure of the assignments and examinations.

Growing the team and driving engagement

My work with the Environmental Lecture Series (RiVo) was driven by a commitment to promoting education on sustainability at TUM, and to achieve such impact, a strong team was fundamental. While organizing the course of the winter semester 2023/24, in addition to the main work of designing the program and curating the speakers for the semester, I initiated a team expansion. I used internal events such as our seminar weekend as recruitment opportunities, leveraging my own passion for RiVo to bring newcomers on board. This strategy worked very well, leading me to implement a formal onboarding process. We grew from a small core of two people to a robust team of eleven dedicated volunteers.

With a solid team, I shifted my focus to improving the student experience. I worked on ways to make the Environmental Lecture Series more interactive and relevant to students from diverse backgrounds, fostering a more collaborative and supportive environment for exploring pressing environmental issues. This resulted in the conception of the “Engagement Labs”, where interactive in-class activities were introduced to make learning as engaging and impactful as possible. Our weekly sessions now consisted of not only lectures by a different speaker each week, but also 30-minute engaging activities organized by me and the team, such as workshops, games and quizzes.



1 The Environmental Lecture Series is a student-led public lecture series that has been running since 1985 at TUM. Every semester, a dedicated team plans and designs a new and inspiring program on current environmental topics, which is translated into a course where students can earn 1 or 3 ECTS.
2 TUM is a public university in Munich. It is one of the largest universities in Germany. A University of Excellence under the German Universities Excellence Initiative, TUM is considered the top university in Germany and the best university in the European Union by the Times Higher Education (THE) 2026 rankings.