Monday, September 26, 2011

Back from Leipzig

Well, the Congress is over and after a very long and very weird train ride, first there was someone who decided to jump in front of another train, which led do a 45 minute delay and after that, some Idiot decided it would be a good Idea to forget his suitcase within the train. And since some other Idiots decided to fly two airplanes into some buildings 10 years ago, a forgotten suitcase in a train is a case for the police. To make a long story short: I arrived in Mainz with a total delay of around two hours yesterday and was as exhausted as I was the days before.

The conference itself was great. I’ll have to admit that I thought I would be able to participate in the discussions there, but I saw pretty quickly that most of the other People there were on a completely different level then I was. This bothered me for quite some time, but then I realised that, as an undergraduate student, I don’t need to know all this stuff by now. So instead of showing off my tremendous knowledge (which I didn’t had) I started to enjoy listening to the stuff other people said and there was a lot of really interesting stuff going on.
In the end, the days in Leipzig were a very exhausting, intimidating and humbling experience, but I’m glad I went there. I saw how much stuff I still need to learn to really understand this field but I also realised that I really want to learn all this stuff. The last days gave me even more motivation to continue my studies so that maybe by the same time next year, I have something to present at the next ESHE Meeting, or somewhere else.
I’ll try to write about some of the stuff I heard in Leipzig within in the next weeks and there’s also this stuff about Australopithecus sediba which I wanted to write. I hope to get this Post done within this week.

At last I want to thank Anna Barros and Tracy Kivell who were both kind enough to answer a bunch of my questions and listened to some of my weirder thoughts during the Poster session on Friday.