Note: Feel free to use this text as inspiration for the essay or video in your application. However, we place great importance on your own creative thoughts regarding this year's call. Don't hesitate to incorporate your own ideas and perspectives.
A call for those who don’t just fill gaps – but explore them.
We are influenced, distorted, steered, or even shaped by gaps.
Between knowledge and application.
Between technology and society.
Between expression and analysis.
Between access and exclusion.
Between shared ground and misunderstood difference.
Between systems, disciplines, and ways of thinking.
Gaps can feel like friction – or potential.
They can mark boundaries – or open up new spaces.
“MIND THE GAP” is an interdisciplinary call inviting you to engage with these in-between zones. Not only as technical or social problems, but as questions that hold the power to shift perspective.
Whether you’re researching, designing, coding, performing, composing, building or reflecting – we’re looking for contributions that make gaps visible without rushing to close them. Projects that can’t be confined to a single field. Ideas that take ambiguity seriously.
Because where things don’t fit (yet), something new might just begin.
To mind the gap is not only to observe – it’s to take a stance.
One that invites dialogue, risk, complexity, and change.
I invite you to formulate an essay as part of your application for a scholarship place in the #class26 of the TUM: Junge Akademie that elaborates on a topic of your choice that fits the call "MIND THE GAP!".
Now, we are looking forward to hearing your thoughts on the society of the future as part of the TUMJA #class26 application process.
Yours sincerely
| Prof. Dr.-Ing. Gerhard Müller TUM Vice President Study and Teaching Director of the TUM: Junge Akademie |