Fall 2023 Update | S7 Episode 2

Another (Michaelmas) term at Cambridge has already finished, so here is a summary.

I’d be lying if I said I enjoy British autumn weather. With colder, wetter, darker days, I did my best to embrace a hygge lifestyle. Still, I got lucky and my birthday was a sunny day. I’m unsure what sounds scariest: being 24 or a third-year PhD student. I have been in Cambridge since the start of my undergrad, so I have now lived in the UK for over six years. As an aside, I am hoping to apply for British citizenship in 2024. One of the citizenship requirements is the “Life in the UK test”. I went to Peterborough in early October to take the test: I passed!

Academically, I continue to focus on learning broadly. I’ve also started to draft some chapters for my thesis, but without rushing (I have funding for a fourth year). More excitingly, last week I gave a talk at EPIDEMICS9. It’s a huge international conference, taking place biennially. Two years ago, it was online; this year, it was in Bologna, Italy.

Bologna is home to the world’s oldest university. I visited it in 2017. So when I found myself in Bologna with a spare day before the evening start of the conference, I planned something different. The least visited country in Europe: San Marino. To get there, I took a train from Bologna to Rimini (in the Adriatic coast). From Rimini, a bus to San Marino City. It is gorgeous and it also ticks a new country off my list.

EPIDEMICS9 was great. I learned a lot, and met researchers I will keep in touch with. The conference was like nothing I had experienced before, in terms of both the depth and breadth of the participants (many big names from my field). It was refreshing to hear about so many interesting topics in my field, and motivates me to keep working. I had spent a lot of time preparing and practising my talk, so I was glad to have a large audience. I think they liked the talk (despite it being in the last slot of a two-hour session in an awkwardly-shaped, boiling-hot room).

It helped that, unlike the previous time I gave a talk at a conference, at EPIDEMICS9, I wasn’t sick. Not falling sick with a cold/covid/flu was my most important training goal for these past months. Being sick in a room with hundreds of people is bad (and ironic if they are epidemiologists). Being sick also prevents me from doing my best work, both professionally and fitness-wise. During winter training last year, I fell sick thrice. I haven’t done a proper literature search on this, but research suggests we are more susceptible to infections after exercise, especially if near over-training. So I am glad I avoided illness (not without effort) since early September.

Virus-free, I had a smooth training block with no sign of the hip injury I got in late August. This autumn, rowing as cross-training helped me avoid overuse of my hip from running, and forced me to hit the weights room weekly. Rowing-wise, it wasn’t the most exciting of the terms, but I enjoyed being back training in a team. The big end-of-term race clashed with my conference, so I didn’t row nearly as much as last year. Unsurprisingly, my rowing fitness is not really at the level it was, but I will hopefully be back at it in the new year. On the other hand, my running fitness is much better than last year. I ran a 5k personal best in a very unexpected manner: during a 5.6k cross-country race (my first ever). This was the Varsity cross-country “mob match” (open to any student) against Oxford, literally the day before I left for my conference. After a week of easy and infrequent running in Bologna, I’m now restarting proper training, at altitude (again!). The goal is sub-1h at the San Silvestre Vallecana. It’s an amazing 10k race in Madrid on New Year’s Eve!

Rowing less also gave me a bit of free time. It was possibly my last chance to do miscellaneous things in Cambridge. Here are some of the highlights. I went to a couple of public lectures: one by Nobel-prizer winner Jennifer Doudna on gene editing, and the Gates Cambridge Annual Lecture. I also went on the Gates trip, to Bletchley Park. As the centre of UK code-breaking during WWII, it became the workplace of (amongst others), Alan Turing. Turing was a King’s College alumnus, and he even rowed for our boat club (KCBC). Coincidentally, I’m currently KCBC’s Alumni officer. This term, I organised the Alumni Boat Club Dinner, preceded by a “boat naming ceremony” (which is essentially what it seems it is).

In hindsight, it wasn’t a bad term. I’m now focusing on getting a few productive weeks before the festivities hit.