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PhD Event 2015 - Anna reports on all Days

PhD Event 2015 - Anna reports on all Days

FuseNet coordinates the 2015 PhD event for students in fusion science and engineering that takes place in Prague. One of the PhD students present, Anna Medvedeva reports:

Monday, November 16

This PhD event has been lasting since two days and is still continuing to surprise me with perfect organisation, well balanced agenda and magnificent Prague, discovered step by step. It seems that the organising team has predicted everything: “speed dating”, talks timing, visits of research centres (virtual reality glasses in laser rooms of ELI were absolutely amazing!), food and drinks, first-day quest-experiments and puzzles (and which team won the second prize? us, having a lot of fun!).

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Anna and her group during the experiments

Old and new friends

We hear some nice talks which draw quite a complete picture of the fusion progress from theoretical, experimental and industrial points of view. But the talks don't fill the whole day, we still gain a lot of time for poster sessions, discussions and just small talks with friends and colleagues. I meet here a lot of old friends from all over Europe and some new people who I will be glad to see again. 

Beautiful Prague

We try to discover beautiful Prague in the evenings with all its cozy pubs, narrow romantic old streets and optimistic mixture of tourists and local citizens both very "bon-vivant". Unfortunately we don't have any free time during the light day without rain to make a small tour in this animated city that has nothing from Kafka's desperate sadness.

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Anna and her friends in Prague

Tuesday, November 17

Save the best for last

The last day was even better than the others!  We started with a short talk about Prague history and continued with a presentation about plasma facing components. Normally I don't work in materials study, but this time I appreciated the structure of the talk and even have memorised all the concepts and some numbers. After student talks and poster session another impressive presentation was waiting for us: ITER communication centre had prepared a lot of nice pictures and videos from the site of construction, and not only that. I find it extremely important to know how they convince people that we should build ITER even if it is not simple. I think I needed to know how to do it, because just believing in what I am doing in fusion is not sufficient to explain to "normal" people why we are working so hard. 

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Dinner and party on the boat

All good things come to an end

After this talk we had small workshops, mine was about black holes and I realy loved it, because the subject is very intriguing but still connected to plasma physics. Well, the closing party on a boat was excellent: the music band was awesome, food was delicious and everyone created a perfect ambience.