Cake for Breakfast

Italian food really is good. The days begin with perfect Italian coffee and cake for breakfast, followed by delicious biscuits and more good coffee at tea time. Lunch is a feast traditionally consisting of a pasta course followed by a meat / fish and vegetable dish and then dessert (how people eat that much for lunch and not sleep all afternoon is beyond me). Hot summer afternoons require gelato. Lazy warm evenings are welcomed with drinks shared with friends and dinner on the square lasts for hours with wine, pizza, panacotta, espresso and limoncello providing a feast. 

I spent the last few days in Padova for a conference and in amongst the work, we had plenty of time to enjoy Italian living. Good food shared with friends and family is the focus, time is not important and stress is just not worth it. It really is quite a clever way to live life. 

The conference on "life-designing: building hope and resilience" was thought-provoking, relevant and inspiring. Essentially, as the world becomes more uncertain with accompanying changes in the labour market, the notion of "career" is evolving too. It is no longer about clearly delineated paths with marked steps. People increasingly have to design their own lives and careers, with uncertainty a prominent feature, transitions numerous and the boundaries between life domains becoming increasingly blurred. Once again, I was reminded of how much I love what I do and just how blessed I am to be working where I am in the team of which I am a part. It is all quite exciting really! I did a presentation and truly experienced flow - the state of being engaged in the task facilitated by a match between the demands of the situation and my skills and resources. I'm grateful to be in the minority of people who find their jobs satisfying. 

So what are my reflections from the last few days? I think relationships and the principle of connected lives accompanied with reciprocity is going to become more and more important - where we find ourselves today is because of people and where we find ourselves tomorrow will be because of others. Kindness and generosity go a long way. I think people need to know how to make the most of current opportunities - it is becoming more and more difficult to engage in traditional career planning. Today will always be a platform for tomorrow. Skill development and transfer are important. But people also need a capacity to act that matches their capability. 

We spend a lot of time talking about how complex the world is and that this complexity is only expected to increase exponentially. But, paradoxically, I think people's needs are becoming more simple. One large research study found that across thousands of people, time and time again, people rated "a happy family" and "a good job" as their top goals. And this is exciting because there is a lot that is in our control that contributes to the fulfillment of these two desires for ourselves and others.   

 

Hope for the future needs to be nurtured, nourished and treasured. Why is it so precious? Because hope is the belief that things will be better tomorrow accompanied by a belief in myself to make it so.

Sunny Sunday!

Today was a wonderful day! We finally had some sun and warmer weather after mostly weeks of rain and grey. I didn't think that I was the type who would be affected by the weather, but after this gloomy month, I have changed my mind! The sun today was very welcome. Waking up to the sun today, I knew that it would be a wonderful day, and it didn't disappoint! I went for a run before heading to church (such a special place to be on a Sunday), and then a friend and I discovered a new place for brunch - which is probably one of my favourite meals - a cosy and cute place down by the lake. We ate like royalty - tea, orange juice, fruit, muesli, salad, eggs, bacon, bread, a croissant, and parma ham and melon... it was so delicious! And sharing this tasty meal with a sweet friend made it all the more wonderful! After this, I met another friend, and we decided to take full advantage of the weather and went to starbucks to pick up some iced caramel macchiatos before heading to a park to soak up the sun and catch up on life. Today I am grateful for sun, lake views, heart-to-heart chats, sweet friends and good food!

More on academic life

A week ago, I had just come back from Münster, Germany for a conference hosted by the European Association of Work and Organisational Psychologists. Before the conference started, I attended a doctorial consortium, a pre-conference workshop event exclusively for PhD students. This was a great way to start the conference. While still building an academic network, attending conferences can feel a bit overwhelming because I don’t know that many people. So the doctoral consortium provided a good opportunity to meet a whole bunch of other PhD students which meant that I recognized many faces during the conference. We also listened to three talks on “creativity during your PhD”, “publishing do’s and don’ts” and “lessons learnt” – all of which were inspiring, engaging and useful.

I attended a combination of sessions throughout the next two days – keynotes, symposiums, presentations, and posters – on a variety of topics both related to my research areas and areas I just find interesting. Most of the talks I attended were of a high quality and I was impressed with the magnitude of research occurring all across the world. I also did a presentation on an article I am busy writing for my PhD, and this was a good exercise – both for clarifying my own thoughts and having an opportunity to discuss it with other people.

I set myself an objective to network at this conference, and I think I was quite successful in doing that. I think being a bit more sure of my own research, aware of some of the names of key researchers in the field, and more clear as to what my objectives for networking were, all helped me to seek out some people and make contact with them. Overall, I was impressed with how willing other researchers were to spend time talking to me. All of these contacts are good for future potential collaborations, possible future jobs or potential visiting scholarships or study exchanges.

I always leave conferences feeling simultaneously totally exhausted and energized. The challenge that awaits in the next few days is to follow up with my new connections, but also to begin applying the things I learnt and solidify my learnings.

Münster was a great city to have a conference too with a picturesque old town that we walked through every day to get to and between the multiple conference venues and  distinct student feel and atmosphere to the city. Münster is also a city full of cyclists – they were everywhere – and clearly we were the foreigners who didn’t know the implicit rules of pedestrian and cycling etiquette. I was quite concerned about getting run over! Europe has been hit by some unseasonably cold weather, so it was rather icy during the conference, which in a way was a good thing – I was definitely more awake!

Along with professional gain, these conferences also provide me with some valuable personal insights. The longer I continue in academia and research (not that 1.5 years is long), I increasingly realize how much I enjoy it. I don’t know what my future holds after my PhD (which is a good thing), but I do know that I will consider a career in research and or academia. And, as has been written on this blog before, these types of experiences reinforce for me how much I have adjusted in the short time I have lived in Europe. Being in Germany felt so foreign with all the language and culture differences. When I arrived in Switzerland almost a year and a half ago, it too felt so foreign. And now it is home. The processes of acculturation and adjustment are really interesting to me (I won’t be surprised if I do research on this one day) and I was once again surprised by how adaptable us humans can be!