My Sixth Easter Term

Easter Term in Cambridge is always nice if you don’t have exams (edit:) AND it’s not 2020. This year, however, the weather wasn’t particularly pleasant at first, with some thunderstorm leading to river closures.

Mandatory-rowing-paragraph

With the Sun back up, I probably didn’t do much outside of rowing and base research. I somehow ended up rowing strokeside for most of the term, having never done it before. Indeed, my rowing highlight is winning a race (Champs ahead – fastest’s women’s VIII), five days after switching sides! This season also gave me a shinny 2k PB, which was a great way to celebrate my two-year rowersary. A bittersweet season for me, I ended up listening to the epic bumps performance of KCBC from Sweden…

NORDITA @ Stockholm: My favourite “work” trip so far.

Even though it was essentially already in May week, my highlight of the term was a 12-day trip to Sweden to participate in a workshop at NORDITA (the Nordic Institute of Theoretical Physics).

Most of you will be confused why I, a PhD student in mathematical biology, went to a Physics Institute. Some of you might even incorrectly guess that my past as a theoretical cosmologist is making a comeback. Rest assured, the topic of this workshop was spot-on in my current interests: evolutionary epidemiology. It just happened to be hosted at Nordita.

I myself was hosted by a friend, fellow Maria, whom I met when we were both master’s students at Christ’s (she did an MPhil in Physics). She’s now a PhD student in quantum physics at Stockholm Uni, which is next door to Nordita, and she happens to live just across the road from there: perfect location! Massive thanks to her for hosting for so long and showing me around: I had a wonderful time!

The workshop itself was a fantastic experience for me, so far unrivalled. It was a blast meeting many of the scientists, from all over the world, whose work I admire and learn from. I also presented my research in a seminar. Many thanks to the organisers! Also thanks to my College King’s for funding my trip there!

I should also say thanks to Akademiska Rowing Club for letting me use their rowing machines, and even one of their singles (a boat for one person only)…I will neither dent nor confirm that this lead to an unexpected swim in the Baltic Sea (but there’s a Strava map if you follow me there…)

Stockholm was really nice. It had lots of green places to go running, and also a Madrid-like imperialist style. It was so light it barely got dark during the nights (we were there for Midsummer) and we got incredibly lucky with the weather — we even went swimming (on purpose) on the sea.

I had never been in Stockholm before, but I had been to Sweden before. This was thanks to a half-day visit to Mälmo from Copenhagen, back in 2014 on a family trip around Denmark. Last summer, I went to Finland, but I had never been to Norway. The opportunity to make it 4 out of 5 Nordic countries was too tempting. We had a spare Sunday, so I made it a day-trip to Oslo (each flight is only one-hour). One of the best days I’ve ever had by myself, and Oslo was also gorgeous!