Custom-made suit
As I stepped out of the train station, I switched into autopilot. I made my way through the thin crowd, crossed the street, and turned right. Of coure I knew exactly where I was. How many times had I walked this exact route? How many times that year did I return to Bremerhaven after an adventure, a weekend away, and walk this exact same route?
I passed my gym, the university, my bank, the Kennedy Bridge. If you had approached me on the street and told me I was a 24-year-old Ph.D. student, I would have laughed in your face. For that moment, I was 21. I was a recent college graduate with a Fulbright grant to my name and the world laid out before me.
It's actually surprising me how easily I've slid back into Bremerhaven. Everything is right where I left it. It feels almost like my life here is a custom-made suit hanging in my closet, and all I had to do was show up and put it back on.
I stopped by the AWI briefly on Monday before meeting friends for dinner, and then came back the next morning to work. My German colleagues are a fantastic group - they have very diverse personalities but all get along quite well. There's a very positive dynamic here, and in fact, it often feels like one big family.
After saying hello to a few people in the morning, I attended the coffee break, which is not technically mandatory but might as well be sacred. You come to the coffee break. I can't tell you how happy it made me to participate in the conversation, because it was just like always. S still tells hilarious stories at lightning speed. A is still a ray of sunshine. K still makes the coffee too strong, and everyone agrees there needs to be a warning sticker on the coffee machine whenever he makes a pot.
I spent a good amount of time in the afternoon talking about my data with two colleagues, Thomas and Melanie. We actually covered a good bit of ground. I'm working on an analysis of dropstone communities in the Fram Strait; a cornerstone of my dissertation that I got the idea for while working at the AWI in 2011-2012. It amazes me sometimes how long it can take for a scientific study to progress from idea to dataset to paper, but the time in between is always worth it.
It was great to step back into my AWI world. I'm proud to be associated with this famous institute and to work with such a wonderful group of scientists.
I passed my gym, the university, my bank, the Kennedy Bridge. If you had approached me on the street and told me I was a 24-year-old Ph.D. student, I would have laughed in your face. For that moment, I was 21. I was a recent college graduate with a Fulbright grant to my name and the world laid out before me.
It's actually surprising me how easily I've slid back into Bremerhaven. Everything is right where I left it. It feels almost like my life here is a custom-made suit hanging in my closet, and all I had to do was show up and put it back on.
I stopped by the AWI briefly on Monday before meeting friends for dinner, and then came back the next morning to work. My German colleagues are a fantastic group - they have very diverse personalities but all get along quite well. There's a very positive dynamic here, and in fact, it often feels like one big family.
After saying hello to a few people in the morning, I attended the coffee break, which is not technically mandatory but might as well be sacred. You come to the coffee break. I can't tell you how happy it made me to participate in the conversation, because it was just like always. S still tells hilarious stories at lightning speed. A is still a ray of sunshine. K still makes the coffee too strong, and everyone agrees there needs to be a warning sticker on the coffee machine whenever he makes a pot.
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| Selfie outside the AWI. There's some great science going on inside that building. |
It was great to step back into my AWI world. I'm proud to be associated with this famous institute and to work with such a wonderful group of scientists.
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