Inception Day

Hi there! Welcome to the last day of "school" before school!

Date: Friday, September 22, 2023

Today was "inception" day. Not like DiCaprio's inception but the ceremonial start of our academic year! Today, the directors from the universities that we will be going to next semester came and pitched their schools to us. There was a representative from NTNU in Trondheim, Norway, two professors from Wageningen, Netherlands, and two from UAB/UB/UPC in Barcelona, Spain. Each of them gave presentations about the focus of the study stream at their school as well as practical information regarding how our internships work, the migration process, etc.

We got to do some networking and talk to the representatives during a lunch reception and we all started to figure out which school we are leaning towards. I knew before I applied to this program that I wanted to go to Norway and study the interaction between the ecosystem and farms while the other learning paths are more about fish immunology and physiology. Our cohort has 25 students and we need to be divided almost equally between each school so we have to rank our choices, write a letter of motivation, have the schools rank us, and hope & pray that we get to go to the school we want! But that doesn't happen until October/November so let's not freak out about it yet!

Here's a silly story for you.

Our programme director puts together a pamphlet of all of the students in my cohort, with our headshots. This makes it easier for our professors (and us) to remember each other's names and it's cool to see the cohorts over the years (we are only the 3rd so it's not that cool yet). But anyway, our programme director sent us a draft to make sure we all liked our photos and our preferred names.

This is what Jean sent us:

So let me get something straight, I had intended to make the smooth"transition" from Katie to Katherine but being KATHY was never part of the plan!!

So I very kindly emailed Jean that if it could please read "Katherine" on the document that would be great!

He replied with: "Ok! But it’s ok we call you Kathy or do you prefer Katherine?"

I, wanting to be clear, replied: "Academically I prefer Katherine, but with friends and close faculty members, I go by Katie. I don’t particularly like Kathy! Thank you for clarifying!"

To which he said: "Noted, miss K!😉"

With the emoji and all.

So I guess we'll see what people call me on Monday.