Lens: Voigtlander color-skopar 35mm f2.5
Camera: NEX-7, ISO100, f8, 1/500, raw
Today I had a meeting at the Institute of Biorobotics, Polo Sant’Anna in Valdera, placed in Pontedera, a little town close to Pisa. I was there to introduce my PhD student to the researchers working on peripheral nerve signal analysis. And to discuss with the researchers how to proceed on a couple of projects we are working on together.
I usually hate traveling for work. These trips spoil at least a whole day, while with skype or other web-meeting solutions you could do the same thing completely remotely. But I guess that, sometimes, direct human interaction is still fundamental, probably due to all that non-verbal communication that is so difficult to transfer even with webcams.
However, this time I enjoyed it. It was so, because it was a long time since I last went to Pontedera. A few years ago, before getting married, before going to the Netherlands, before all of that, I worked in these labs for four months on my Master degree thesis. I was really young and that was my first contact with real science, I mean it was the first time I picked a topic, read most of the literature about it, found a couple of missing things, worked on setting up experiments to study them, worked on the results, and wrote about all of that. It was a lots of fun. And those labs are great, they are among the best in Europe, and they are full of incredibly smart guys and girls working on the most different fields. I remember that every time I had an issue with my experiments, I always found some expert willing to help me to figure that out.
So, here I am, at the train station of Pontedera, overwhelmed by the memories of those months. The time in which I was so excited to be part of science. The last time I took the train I was running to get my degree, and a job as a scientist in a foreign country. And now that I’m back, I am wondering if I shouldn’t take a different track.