And here I am in Tucson! After sleeping the jet lag through (one night’s sleep and I was fine! 🙂 ), we had a very busy day at the OSA Student Leadership Conference, with plenty of inspiring talks and good speakers. Plus, it was quite refreshing to see what kind of activities other student chapters across the world are doing, and eventually – ahem – take some of those ideas back to our own Student Chapter!
Pretty productive day, and met a lot of interesting people so far. And now… let the actual conference begin! 🙂 (and I’m now going to bed, as I still want to cram an early morning run before things start getting busy…)
Some more photos of the glorious sunshine (which turned into rain in the evening, British-weather-style) are available on my Flickr album.
So yeah, I’m back to Canterbury after a much-needed holiday. Too be absolutely honest, it wasn’t much of a relaxing holiday (with teaching, half-marathons and stuff), but then again it was enough for me to wind down a bit in terms of my lab work (in essence I had a holiday from the lab!).
And now I’m back to “normality” – after more than two years in Canterbury (and over a year and a bit in my current place) I feel I’m already getting slightly rooted to this place, and being in Porto feels foreign, almost as if I’m just visiting from a tourist point of view!
Even though I have just arrived a couple of weeks ago, soon I’ll be off again – I managed to be able to attend a big international conference which is not in Porto (because I’ve done two of those already…). This time I’m off to Tucson, Arizona for Frontiers in Optics/Laser Science 2014, where I’ll be presenting some of the work published earlier in the year (and depending on the outcome of the post-deadline abstract we submitted earlier this week, perhaps even a bit more! But I’m not holding my hopes too high…).
It feels really exciting, as I’ve never been in the States before (actually I’ve never travelled outside Europe!), and this conference in particular seems to have people from virtually all over the world (I’ve been in touch with a few other participating students in order to arrange cheaper accommodation and they do come from basically everywhere, ranging from the United States themselves to the Far East!). And, unlike the two other international conferences I’ve participated so far (EWOFS back in 2010 and RIAO/OPTILAS last year) this time I’m actually giving a talk! Even though I’m quite accustomed to public speaking this is quite a daunting task, especially since there might be some top “celebrities” in our area of research in the room.
So yeah, it will be fun. And after the conference I’ll head to the Grand Canyon for a couple of days – very looking forward for the drive, even though it will be quite a long one (380 miles just from Tucson to Page, by the Glen Canyon Dam). Better get some appropriate soundtrack for it!
And on the meantime I’ve just been busying myself with more lab work (some exciting things and collaborations seem to be happening, with a lot of potential research avenues to explore! Although I will need to start forging a concise path soon, as I only have 1 year of PhD left…), teaching (can you believe that the undergrads are back already?? Soon there will be tonnes of marking as well… 🙁 ) and lots of rowing and running (the weather has been relatively kind to me, even though it got significantly colder over the previous weekend!). And I have to prepare Sao Silvestre – it is already in December and my goal for this year (which seems a bit too overly-ambitious) is to go under 40 minutes… (at least I need have a better time than my 43 minutes and something from last year!)
Well, Porto came and went (too quickly, indeed…) and I returned to the island and to my busy schedule (at times). Funnily enough, as soon as I got back one of my university mates came to visit and we spent a nice weekend roaming around Kent, with the mandatory stop at Whitstable to get some oysters.
May was a bit slow… between work at the lab, a pile of lab reports to mark (yeah, I gave myself a proper holiday in Porto and didn’t even look at them during the whole time I was there – but then the problem came in May when I had to finish them all in a very short span of time! 😛 ), and a very busy time at PARSUK (we had to assess the student applications to the summer placement programme we are sponsoring – and there were a lot of applications!!) I didn’t have a lot of time to do anything else.
My mom and my little sister did came to visit me by the end of the month, which was nice, if it wasn’t for the horrible weather we had and all the miles I had to drive under that rain (unbelievable the spray that forms on the motorway, it came to a point when the water was being projected over the central reservation into the opposite carriageway!!). After showing them the views and going to London for some sightseeing, using a bank holiday weekend for that purpose, I felt happy but also a bit tired (after returning from dropping them at the airport on Tuesday morning I have to confess I didn’t do much in the lab for the remainder of the day!).
June started with a few meetings and workshops. I attended a National Instruments (NI)/Institute of Physics half-day meeting at Kingston University (SW London) with some of the usual suspects from the lab where I gave a little presentation in conjunction with Adrian B about the NI hardware/software we use and how that helps us achieve what we need, research-wise. It was interesting and I chatted with a few interesting people, namely one of the top level execs of NI here in the UK.
At the Summer School, where I got an award for one of the best poster presentations – feeling proud!
A few days later I went to Teddington to attend a Summer School at the National Physical Laboratory, sponsored by SEPNet (the group of the South-East universities with Physics degrees, Kent being one of them). It was interesting and refreshing, even if myself and Yong H were the only ones in there doing Applied Optics, as far as I saw… but they had some very interesting workshops, an innovation challenge that brought up the “soft skills” we are never taught but are definitely important, and Jim Al-Khalili as the keynote speaker! (oh, and there were a few social events as well… the weather was remarkably good for those, and in the end I even managed to cram a few nice runs in the morning, in particular a ~10k one partly following the Thames in the Kingston/Hampton Wick area – absolutely beautiful!).
All the participants of LUSO 2014 congregated for a group photo after the event. The venue was quite unique as well!And here it is, the PARSUK committee for 2013-14, possibly our last group photo of the mandate. It has been quite a ride!…
And in the following week I headed for Bath, to attend the 8th LUSO (2014) – the annual meeting of the Portuguese students and researchers in the UK. Ultimately this would be also the time to pass on my duties as a treasurer for PARSUK, given that our mandate finishes at the AGM, which took place the day after the conference. It was very intense but also good fun, and I feel privileged to have been able to work with such a great bunch of people. Definitely worth the horrible ~4-hour drive there on Friday afternoon through the congested M25, followed by the congested M3, congested Windson and congested A46, all under a scorching sun (“why would I need a car with air conditioning in this country?”, I naively asked myself when I purchased my car. Well, on a day like June 20th it would have come handy… 😛 ).
Cake skill – acquired! (actually it is only a yoghurt cake, possibly the easiest cake to bake on Earth, but it was still quite yummy! ) And please do not ask why I am topless, it was really warm that day and the oven being on didn’t help! 😛Almost ran this little fellow over with the lawnmower today! Fortunately I managed to stop in time, and it stayed enough time for me to take a few shots…
At last I managed to have a weekend for myself – this weekend included some rowing, some running, and general tidying up of my house, my car, the garden (managed to mow all the lawn, trim the hedges and tidy up before the rain started!! Big WIN!! 😀 ).
A selfie at the boathouse! Nice boat, this one…
With regards to running: Richard, one of my rowing mates told me about this fantastic nature reserve in Blean – Blean (duh) Nature Reserve – just a stone’s throw from campus and featuring a fantastic 7-8 mile loop through forest paths and rolling countryside, hard to believe that we are less than 5 miles away from Canterbury city centre! Given that I have just presented myself with a shiny new Garmin Forerunner 310XT (which should arrive this week – eagerly awaiting, and a review will follow!) I will probably use it to log a few of these trails, which are not very well documented, which is a shame!
OK, I think I’ll end here. It is late and I need to catch some sleep, I am dead tired today 🙂 Hopefully will update soon!
Spent all afternoon printing a fresh batch of lab reports to mark :P. And now, let the fun begin!… (apparently tomorrow the weather will not be as inviting as today, so I really have no excuses for not starting… 🙁 )
Anyway, I shouldn’t complain that much, this morning I had a brilliant outing on a single scull – no wind, no rain, had the river all for myself (and its banks, as I kept hitting them 😛 ). It was quite chilly, though… (couldn’t feel my hands for more than a quarter of the outing) Ah, I’m eagerly waiting for the warmer months…
… it turns out my lab was visited during my absence by her cousin, the good lab fairy! Not only were the windowsills cleaned (cobwebs everywhere, one could hardly call that a clean room!), but the issue that was affecting my system seems to have magically vanished.
I’ve documented it, tested it, wrote a case to present to the NI engineers so that they could help me sort out my issue, and yet… it healed on its own!
One has to say… I should go on holidays more often and leave things sort themselves out! 😀
PS: apparently the windowsills business was actually the cleaners who came during the time I was out. But again the good lab fairy was there, as no fibres were broken nor is the system misaligned! 🙂
After spending a week living precariously, sleeping in couches and basically wearing the same clothes because I couldn’t reach my suitcase, I have finally moved in to my new place on Thursday – and what a difference!
6 places visited and I eventually settled for the very first one I saw – it wasn’t the cheapest, the room wasn’t the largest I saw, but I really fell in love with the place: big garden (and a beautiful one, too: what a difference from the rectangle of grass I had in my previous house here in Canterbury!), very, very bright (important when the sky is cloudy 90% of the time). It is a calm place, too: I can relax properly when coming home from the lab, and we have an interesting household, too – I really can’t ask for more!
And tomorrow I will start my teaching duties at the university – I will be doing some demonstrations for 1st-year students’ labs, along with some marking (thankfully, that will not start right now). Looking forward to it…
There are still a couple of things on my check list that must be taken care of, though: I need to get a bicycle, urgently! (walking is OK, but so slow… the time required to go to Sainsbury’s to do some shopping actually tripled!) And I also need to re-join both the rowing club and the gym – meanwhile, I’ll run whenever the weather allows it (now that I’ve moved in, I managed to reach my running kit and did a 6k run yesterday). Running in here is quite different from running in Gaia, though – I miss those 30k of uninterrupted path by the river- and sea-side, in here I have to be forever vigilant with the numerous road-crossings (and the lack of zebra crossings mean that cars have the right of way all the time…).
