Photo: Daniela Walch
The world seems a bit confusing lately. You have not noticed? Well, the student representatives surely did when planning for this semester’s first breakfast event to happen. Will we be able to serve food? Is the room big enough? WHO is actually still up here and able to give us some interesting insight into their work? Do we need a contact tracing list (teaser: we do!)? With great support and help by staff here at UNIS, a safe and tasty plan for our nerdiest breakfast at 78° North was shaped and put into place. It included prepared sandwiches to avoid long waiting times at the buffet, single use plates and loads of sanitizers and clean wipes as well as a contact tracing list. And finally, almost all remaining PhD and guest master students at UNIS gathered on the 30th September in Lassegrotta.
One of the first things, Christina and I wanted to put into place as the new bioCEED student representatives at UNIS was a change in the name. bioBREAKFAST has delivered great talks and tasty food to UNIS students over the past two years and has been a UNIS wide event for a long while now, with participants and speakers from all departments of the University Centre. Therefore, the event has been announced as “unisBREAKFAST – sponsored by bioCEED” for the first time.
Pretty soon, two speakers were found and we were able to announce and advertise a geophysics themed unisBREAKFAST via facebook and mail and were happy to see so many people interested and signing up for the event. To support local suppliers, we ordered fresh and tasty cinnamon buns to supply energy in the morning and prepared a nice and cozy breakfast for our participants. We were amazed to see how many students were gathering in the end. Soon most of the COVID-safe available spots in Lassegrotta were filled with hungry people. Hungry not only for the tasty cinnamon buns and coffee but also for the presentations of our two speakers 🙂
After a short introduction to and welcome by your bioCEED representatives, we enjoyed the entertaining talk by Mikkel, who enlightened us about “Predicting the Location of the Aurora: How solar particle measurements can be used to create models predicting the location of the aurora.” After a short break and refills on sandwiches and juice, Lukas told us about “Weather forecasting in Svalbard: Challenging for several reasons!”. Each presentation was followed by a short Q&A session, in which the speakers shared their personal experiences while working on their theses and valuable lessons learned.
As this was the first event, Christina and I were interested to get some feedback on the event and prepared some feedback sheets. We will use this information to make the next unisBREAKFAST, which is likely to take place in November, even more valuable to the students here at UNIS. We already received multiple notes of interested from students to present in our next event! That’s amazing and we look forward to it.
Author: Daniela Walch, bioCEED student representative at UNIS