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Three days that change how you lead.

  • 8th Edition
  • 3–5 March 2027
  • Neustift Monastery
  • 40 places
Overhead view of young participants in dark shirts sitting in a circle on chairs, reading printed sheets during a group workshop discussion

Selected by your school?

Start your application

What RYLA Junior is

RYLA Junior is a Rotary programme. For three days, forty students aged 16 to 18 come to Neustift Monastery in South Tyrol to work on one thing: how to lead.

You do not apply out of the blue. Your school picks you — for your results, and for what they have seen you do with other people. Four Rotary Clubs from South Tyrol and Munich run the camp and pay for it.

It costs you nothing. Accommodation, meals, transport during the camp and insurance are covered.

A large group posing outdoors in front of the frescoed well pavilion of the monastery courtyard, holding the RYLA and Rotary banners, under a blue sky
The group at Neustift

Why you were selected

Your school did not pick you at random. Schools are asked for students with strong academic results who already take responsibility for other people — in class, in a club, in a team, in something nobody asked them to start.

Someone at your school watched you do that and put your name forward. This page is not a test you have to pass. It tells you what happens next.

What happens next

  1. Your school selected you

    That part is done. Your name has reached the organisers.

  2. You apply

    You apply through the form on the application page. It opens before the deadline and closes on it.

    1 February 2027

  3. You hear back

    After the deadline there is a short selection step. When it is done, you hear from us whether you have a place.

What you'll learn

Two things, weighted equally. Leadership, because that is what the programme is for. Artificial intelligence, because it is changing the work you are about to walk into.

[ 01 / Leadership ]

A speaker with a headset microphone talking and gesturing in front of a large photographic print, beside a lectern carrying the Durst name, with heads of the audience in the foreground

  • From people who built something

    Owners and managing directors come to the monastery and talk about decisions they actually had to make, including the ones that went wrong. Past editions brought Harald Oberrauch of Durst, Michael Oberhofer of Brandnamic, chef Norbert Niederkofler and Thomas Reiter of Skirama Kronplatz. You get to ask them anything.

  • By deciding under pressure

    Team tasks with a running clock. The Marshmallow Challenge is one of them: dry spaghetti, marshmallows, a group that has never worked together, and one thing that has to hold itself up. You find out fast what your way of talking does to a team when time is short.

  • By running your own thing

    You take a group, work out a position and defend it in front of forty people. Nobody hands you the role. You take it or you do not, and both of those teach you something worth knowing about yourself.

[ 02 / AI ]

Participants seated at wooden tiered desks in a modern auditorium with a slanted glass wall, following a talk

  • How companies actually use it

    Not the headlines. Harald Oberrauch has shown how Durst puts AI to work in production, and Franz Tschimben of Covision Media works at the front edge of the field. You see where it earns its keep and where it is still a demo with good lighting.

  • What it does to work

    The seventh edition looked hard at how AI is changing the labour market: which jobs shift, which ones appear, and which assumptions about a career stop holding. You are the people who will be working in that market.

  • How to judge what it gives you

    An answer that sounds confident is not the same as an answer that is right. You practise checking output, noticing where a model is guessing, and deciding when not to use one at all. That judgement is the part that stays useful.

What you'll experience

Three days of talks, company visits, team tasks, and evenings in the monastery.

  • Students wearing tour headsets listening to a guide at an illuminated inspection table during a company visit

    Company visits

    You walk through the Brandnamic campus and Durst in Brixen, and hear how both companies are changing because of AI.

    [ AI ]
  • Three men standing at the front of a tiered wooden auditorium, with participants seated on the steps behind them

    Top-class speakers

    Founders, professors, coaches and a Paralympics participant. Every talk is followed by a discussion, and the questions come from you.

    [ Leadership ]
  • A speaker with a microphone beside a projected slide, seen over the heads of participants in the front row

    Talks on AI

    One professor argues for the chances of AI, another for its risks. You decide which side held up.

    [ AI ]
  • Students standing in a row with their raised hands joined into an arch, in front of a Rotaract Club Bolzano-Bozen banner, while an organiser looks on

    Workshops

    Together with Rotaract and Interact you plan a charity project in the evening. The next morning the group decides on it.

    [ Leadership ]
  • Five students in the monastery hall joining dry spaghetti with marshmallows into a spreading lattice during the Marshmallow Challenge

    Team challenges

    Dry spaghetti, marshmallows, a running clock and a group that has never worked together. Something has to stand at the end.

    [ Leadership ]
  • A row of participants standing in front of a floor-to-ceiling window, facing seated listeners, with an organiser standing at the end of the row

    Your turn to speak

    You work out a position with your group and defend it in front of everyone else. Nobody hands you the role.

    [ Leadership ]
  • Six participants sitting around a low table with a chess set in the vaulted monastery lounge, under a wall carrying an illuminated manuscript

    Evenings together

    Music, games and long conversations in the vaulted lounge of the monastery, with the Rotaract and Interact clubs.

    [ Camp life ]
  • Participants holding their certificates at the end of the 2024 camp, with the organisers kneeling in front

    The final day

    The camp ends with the diploma ceremony. Parents, teachers and the Rotary and Rotaract clubs come to see you receive it.

    [ Camp life ]

Who you'll meet

Owners, founders, managing directors and professors. Not a panel on a stage — you eat with them, walk through their companies with them, and ask them things you would not otherwise get to ask.

The names below are from past editions. The programme for the eighth is still being put together.

Where

Neustift Monastery in Vahrn, South Tyrol. Simple rooms, each with its own bathroom, no TVs, and no particular reason to leave.

That is the point. For three days there is nothing to do except the thing you came for.

Neustift Monastery seen from the vineyard path above it: the church with its green tiled roof, the monastery buildings around it, and the valley and mountains behind

What the press wrote

The press reported on past editions. The full press review is on its own page.

All press coverage

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