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words to start

by R.P.

Today is a beautiful sunday. I slept almost 11h and feel really excited about my forthcoming stay as visiting researcher in Stockholm! So I decided to open this blog. It is intended to:

  • keep my family, friends and people who helped me to get to Stockholm updated

  • force me to experience my stay in a concsious way by reflecting

  • provide myself a hobby to let my creativity flow :-)

But why will I move to Stockholm?
I am a german student of physics in my 3rd year of studies. There are different reasons why I’ve chosen to spent seven month abroad as a visiting researcher and not as an exchange (ERASMUS ) student. First of all I wanted to experience research! As a student it is your job to learn a lot of different stuff in a (relatively) short time. But that is not what I love to do. I like to have all the time to immerse myself in one scientific project - that is how the best ideas arise. And what is more, I am on my way to decide about a topic for my diploma thesis - and actually I do not want to deal with just some project. So I decided to connect a stay abroad with the insight in real reserach.
And why Stockholm?
Well, I wanted to live in a nordic state for a while. And I (actually we: my girlfriend and me) decided for Sweden, because swedish was the only nordic language course offered at our home university. So that is why Sweden. And Stockholm is because of the fact, that it is a cosmopolitan city, where a lot of different research is done and I found (with a lot of fortune) the group where I will be working from September 2008 till march 2009.
What will I do there?
I will be a student guest researcher at Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan (KTH - Royal Institue of Technology) with Professor Erik Aurell. He is a theoretical physicist dealing with a lot of issues concerning dynamical systems theory. At the moment he is the head of the chair of Theoretical Biophysics at KTH. I am really glad, that I got contact to him and his group since I wanted to deal with issues concerning dynamical systems/chaos theory or statistical physics. In this regard I want to thank Thomas Thiemann and Stefan Hofmann, who helped me getting contact to Erik Aurell.
I also want to thank Prof. Gerhard Schäfer, who encouraged me in my decision and helped me with some formalities.