Yesterday was finally my last day of work before leaving for Japan Friday next week. Okay, that is not entirely true since I have to hand in an assignment before August 1st, but now I am definitely not as stressed anymore. The week before last, I presented at a small conference which was arranged by one of my co-supervisors. The conference considered nano-composites which is not directly relevant for my study, but it was somewhat okay. The auditorium did seem somewhat oversized for the number of attendees though.
The conference dinner was pretty nice, but it would have helped a bit if the room had some windows (it got pretty hot) ^^.
The week after I went to the ICCM20 conference which was held in the Bella Center last week. It was HUGE! With 1200 presenters, 200 poster presentations, and a total of 1800 attendees, it had around 20 parallel tracks for presentations. Just finding out which presentations to attend was a challenge in itself. The program book was around 1cm thick, and for each day it had around 15 pages (a total of 5 days).
I was lucky that my presentation was on the first day, so I was able to relax for most of the conference. The room where I had to present was not very large, and there were not a lot of people watching the presenter before me, so I was preparing myself to present for only 10 people. However, when the time of my presentation got near the room started filling up, and in the end there were not enough chairs for everyone to sit down. There was a bit of a mismatch between the room size they had chosen, and the number of people interested. I was told that some people were standing outside as well.
My presentation went very well; I wasn’t nervous, I got good questions, and I even got a few business cards put in my hand when I sat down. This kind of experience really makes you feel like putting a lot of effort into my work is worth it! And of course it was also awesome to see that so many people from various countries find the topic of my PhD interesting.
Monday evening all the attendees of the conference went to Tivoli and it was SO crowded (because of us)! Tuesday evening after the conference program I went with my supervisor and a colleague to show our lab facilities to 5 Japanese visitors (also attending ICCM). Afterwards we went to have dinner at a restaurant in Roskilde where we got some… interesting food I would say. It wasn’t bad, just a bit special! I never thought I would eat dessert from a flowerpot or get food served on a tile – but apparently I was wrong! We had a good time though ^^
All in all I had an awesome week, but I surely cannot fit anymore new information into my head right now. Now I better start doing some cleaning and consider what I need to pack for Friday!
