Y-ECCO Members’ Address
Dominik Bettenworth, Y-ECCO Chair
 Dominik Bettenworth© ECCO |
Dear Y-ECCO Friends,
I hope this Members’ Address finds you well.
Those who want to succeed in academia have to lead and love the life of an academic athlete. This lifestyle, together with its (daily?) exercises and training tools, has been masterfully illustrated by Eric Benchimol and Richard Keijzer in a recent article for the Mentoring, Education, and Training corner in Gastroenterology (Gastroenterology 2018;154:8–14). Indeed, the advent of technological applications has created powerful tools to improve organisation and productivity. Furthermore, social media provides valuable platforms that have substantially decreased barriers between different centres, experts from other disciplines and even colleagues from other continents, making it possible to connect in real time.
I can still recall when Tim Raine (UK) came up with the idea of a Y-ECCO Twitter feed and remember our excitement as we sat together as the Y-ECCO Committee in the lobby of a Viennese Hotel and launched the @Y_ECCO_IBD Twitter handle in July 2016. Since then, the @Y_ECCO_IBD Twitter account has attracted more than 1100 followers and the reader of this Members’ Address is more than welcome to join and interact with us via Twitter about IBD education and research news.
Although opportunities provided by novel technologies are breathtaking, we learnt from many conversations during the Y-ECCO Career Workshops that a direct interaction between junior doctors and senior mentors are still at the very top of your wish list. Therefore, we are very excited about the upcoming 1st Y-ECCO Mentorship Forum in June 2020: please bear in mind that the application deadline is January 16, 2020. You can find the preliminary programme and the application form here: https://www.ecco-ibd.eu/education/y-ecco-mentorship-forum.html.
I would like to conclude on a personal note: This will be my last Members’ Address as the Y-ECCO Chair since I will be stepping down at the next ECCO Congress (Vienna 2020). I am very thankful for the opportunity to have contributed to the Y-ECCO family and its projects for 3 years and to have served as chair for the last year. I have learnt a lot and feel privileged to have worked with so many inspirational and supportive colleagues within ECCO. Johan Burisch (Denmark) will be the new Y-ECCO Chair and I am 100% sure that Y-ECCO will be in safe hands..
A big thank you and all the best to all of you,
Dominik
Y-ECCO Chair