I decided to do this placement for two main reasons; the first one was that the workshop was organised by some of the well-established researchers from optimization field, here I wanted to express my work in order to start conversation and build connections. And secondly this workshop was a mixture of senior researchers and early stage researchers, allowing me the opportunity of working closely to other researchers that might have common interests and collaborate with them to write future papers.
Through discussions with my supervisor I found out about this workshop and I expressed my interest in attending it. Consequently, I received an invitation to attend.
I have received an email with the invitation, and registered my interest in attending the venue.
Lorentz Center it is a well known place for international workshops and I really wanted to attend to one of their workshops.
The main responsibilities were to attend each day and participate to different topic discussions. We had the opportunity here to propose a topic that we wanted to discuss with others or attend to other topics proposed by the other participants. If we had proposed a topic, we had the obligation to allocate it to a room and time slot, during the session we had to make sure that a report was written as an outcome of the discussions. The other responsibility was the free movement between topics, if we consider that during a session, we don't feel that we can contribute much we could move to another room where maybe another topic of interest was taking place were we maybe contribute and learn a lot more.
A typical day started at 8.30am and finished at 6.30pm. Each day we had to choose what topics we would like to be involved in. Because I went to the workshop with my supervisor and another colleague, we split ourselves in order to cover as many topics as possible and make as many connections as possible. During the first day I attended a session of presentations, and also in order to get the discussion started I have proposed to hold a presentation with a topic I was interested in working in and which had common interest to others. The aim with this presentation was to see which other researchers are interested in a collaborative work to try and solve these issues. The following two days I attended the open space event. Here I proposed a topic to discuss some issues, I have found in my research but also, I have participated to other different topics proposed by others because I was interested to work and learn more about the particular issues proposed. The last two days we had the opportunity to choose and prioritize what are the most 5 or 6 topics that we as a community should act on in order to bring some solutions to the problems proposed. After this selection I chose to participate in two main topics which were in my main interest of research. Here we started to do some research work about the particular issues and bring some solutions or report what the problems are and how should someone start approaching to solve them in form of a conference/journal paper or book chapter.
I really enjoyed the open space event because of the freedom of movement where I had the opportunity to meet and work with a large number of researchers but also challenge myself as a researcher. The other nice thing about this was that early stage researchers were really welcome to bring ideas and did not felt constrained by others that have more experience in research.
After this experience I feel much more confident in my ability to form part of a research team. I had already thought about doing a postdoc, and after attending this workshop actually think that opened a few doors for me for a future fellowship or postdoc with other research groups.
During the PhD try and attend as many opportunities as this one I have attended. Don't worry about not knowing all the research done in a particular field or what you are going to do. The important thing is to expand you network and gain the most out of the experience but also to be able to quickly adjust to new ideas.
Form completed: 19 Nov 2019