Institute

In the past days, I got to know more and more people in the institute. I share the visitors' office with Zenek, an exchange Phd student from Krakow and two more PhD students who work all on neural networks in the brain. Although we sit in the ISB (interdisciplinary sciences building), I am a visitor of SCIPP, the Santa Cruz Insitute of Particle Physics, which does astro- and particle physics, both theoretically and experimentally.
Last week I worked alone, but today my supervisor Howie arrived after his trips to conferences at CERN, Bonn, Granada,... Furthermore, starting from tomorrow, I will also attend the group meetings and some seminars. Stefano, a nice Italian professor and theory coordinator here, put me on the email list and asked me to present the topic of my master's thesis in the group meeting next Tuesday. So I'll be very busy this week! Howie told me that SCIPP people regularly go to SLAC at Stanford to attend the theoretical particle physics seminar talks there! I can join them this Wednesday. Of course, I am also very curious to see SLAC :-)
Since there is no university canteen, people bring their own lunch and usually eat it in their office. Thus, the lunch break does not last long. I really liked the DESY/ CERN/ Göttingen/ Helsinki (also Fermilab, despite the poor choice of vegetarian dishes) lunch breaks when all go together to the mensa and even have a coffee afterwards. At least Howie suggested today to have a picknick together. So there were him, one of his PhD students and me, and we could sit outside.