Hello everyone! Welcome back!
How are you all, around the world?
Here in Finland life is SUPER GREAT! At the beginning of April we had the last (hopefully!) snow storm. Luckily after easter, all the snow melted, the sun started to come out more often and the temperature is now above zero (average is between 5-10°C).
So, what have I been up to?? Work, lots and lots of work.
First of all, I have great news (for me, at least...): during the winter I was working on a research for a company and wrote a paper, a scientific paper. On April 2nd I got notified that it has been accepted to be presented at a conference in June!!!!!! I am super excited about it!!! I'm not sure what I want to do in my future, I'm thinking about doing a PhD and pursuing an academic career so to have a publication, before I have even graduated, well... it's amazing!
The conference is called EuroHaptics and it's in Tampere (Finland) from the 12-15 June. Unfortunately I won't be able to go because I have to work, but that's ok.
If you have been following the facebook group HTLab, you might have read that I started an online course from Stanford University on Game Theory. There's lots of math and logic and I don't have a lot of time to keep up with it, but it's going to be very useful for my thesis.
Next week I'll be teaching a class in a course I've been attending this semester, Human-Computer Interaction. The lecture will present the research I did this winter. Although I have experience at teaching, the students I've had were always young (up to high school) and I was giving them private lessons. Here, students are undergrads and they NEVER talk, even if you ask questions. Believe me, it's scary! You just keep wondering if you're saying boring stuff, if they're listening, if they notice you are nervous, etc.
As for my thesis, I started working on the plan and hopefully this next week we can start doing something more concrete. I won't explain now what I'll be doing, just to not jinx it! But since I'm starting so late, I will be staying here until the end of May. So, just a little over a month left...
Enough with work stuff though..
I haven't been travelling much in this second semester. Mostly because the weather was always cold, but also because I haven't had much time. Hopefully now that spring has arrived I can go around more, I really want to go to S. Petersburg, since it's so close!
I've been hanging out a lot with my work collegues and today we went to have a BBQ on an island. Wind aside, it was lovely! I'm adding pictures of the past few months (sorry for not updating!).
An other positive note of this country... the days have been getting longer and longer! Sun rises at 5:40 and sets at 21:00 but you can see the last traces of the sunset until 22:00!!! It's amazing! For now, I really like it, but I noticed that until it starts getting dark I don't stop working, which means it will be more difficult later on when the days will be even longer. Just in two weeks time the sun will set at 21:30 and in total we gain 1 hour and 10 minutes of light! I've never been used to this!
That's all for now!
No comments:
Post a Comment