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All scholarship holders

Maxim Oweyssi

Our scholarship holder 2018 – 2022

University

The University of Edinburgh

Field of study

Physics

Contact

maxim.oweyssi@gmail.com

I was motivated to study science primarily by curiosity. Whenever I see a door half open, I cannot help peeking in because I hate the idea of “not knowing”, “not seeing” or “missing out on” something. It was precisely due to this curiosity that I started to actively seek activities beyond my curriculum when I was a student at the Jan Neruda Grammar School in Prague. While in high school, I took several internships, including one at the Institute of Physics of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University, and these internships assured me that physics is the field of study that fulfills me the most. I participated in several competitions and conferences on both the national (AMAVET, CanSat) and international (Math en Jeans) level. When science is not involved, I like debating as part of the Prague Student Summit and similar events. When not on academic soil, I like music and photography.

Support from The Kellner Family Foundation has enabled me to study physics at a Russell Group university in the UK, a field that is developing rapidly thanks to technological progress and that I want to focus on in terms of theoretical research in the future. I look forward to university life as well as to building friendships and gaining contacts in a new environment.

secondary

Jan Neruda Grammar School

Royal Alexandra and Albert School (UK) in 2015

Lycée Pierre et Marie Curie (France) in 2014

tertiary

The University of Edinburgh, four-year BSc Physics program, beginning 2018, expected graduation in 2022 with a BSc (Hons) degree

E-mail:

maxim.oweyssi@gmail.com

Goals

I try to better understand the world around me through physics. The more I have been focusing on the field, the more it piques my interest, and so I would like to conduct research in deeper areas of physics that ask the fundamental questions regarding the functioning of reality.

Interests

Physics, mathematical informatics, philosophy, music, playing the guitar and keyboards with a band, debating, model United Nations, international politics

My articles and what has been written about me

Universities

08/19/2021

Alma Mater

I've had the pleasure to speak at a “go abroad” session hosted by my highschool in Prague.

Universities

05/14/2021

Starting out

There are many things I want to do and have been putting off for ages. Things like having the experience of baking sourdough bread over lockdown. I've been counting the waves of the pandemic go by, from the first through to the second… It was only during the tail end of the third wave that I finally asked my friend for some sourdough starter and decided to crack on. The results? Well it's good, but what makes it even better is that it finally justifies all the time I spent thinking about it!

Universities

11/30/2020

First semester in photos

I reckon the most important lesson of this semester has been that more stress does not necessarily mean more gain. In previous years, I would often let university stress overtake other domains of my life, like spending time with my friends, going for hikes or preparing healthy meals. This year, however, I've been trying to manage and organise my time instead of “succumbing” to anxiety that is, more often than not,counterproductive. When organised, the impenetrable wall of Quantum Theory lectures and Lagrangian Mechanics worksheets become scalable. I get to stop and think, look around and maybe even have a coffee. In those moments, more than ever before, I appreciate the beauty of the city of Edinburgh. I have captured my new found appreciation below.

Universities

07/16/2020

Squeezing the most out of it

When Hydrogen is pressurised to more than 25 gigapascals, its interatomic bonds should “melt” and it would turn from an insulator into an electron conducting metal with potentially sci-fi like properties.

Universities

02/28/2020

Saturnian language

All lectures and tutorials will be done in a month as this year’s exam period looms overhead. This year was somehow significant to me. I finally feel at home in Edinburgh and, perhaps even more importantly, I think the way I approach my study of Physics is changing.

Universities

11/29/2019

Being Czech abroad

I think that anyone who has studied abroad recognises some kind of identity crisis as one of their first significant experiences. One is suddenly unsure of where they belong and, even more so, with whom they belong. As time passed, I slowly overcame this uncertainty, realising how meaningless it is to only view people based on where they are from. With that attitude I never could have hoped to meet the friends that I have and to finally stop feeling straddled between two worlds.

Universities

08/30/2019

To teach or not to teach

London is a profoundly strange place. Over the past three weeks I’ve been here as s Physics teaching assistant and I’ve often found myself stopping and thinking about the sheer size of the metropole. When comparing it to Edinburgh, everything is twice as fast and four times as long. Coming here was a little bit like when the derailleur on a bicycle switches to a lower gear: the pedals may be spinning very fast, but the journey still takes ages, in fact… about an hour and a half on average, which happens to be a particularly painful 90 minutes of exercise when cycling in hot weather, with the hay fever and on a fixed gear bike.

Universities

03/25/2019

Gilets Jaunes in Toulouse

In January, I took some extra shifts at the cafe where I work so that I could buy myself a birthday present, a ticket from Edinburgh to Toulouse. The original plan was to simply visit a friend doing his pilot training in France, however the date of my visit just so happened to be during large scale protests by the yellow vests “movement“. I’d generally prefer not to digress into the motives of the manifestants, however since I have, luckily/unluckily, found myself in the centre of it all and just so happened to have my camera with a fresh roll of film on me, I decided to try and find the “human” snippets inside the general craze, because I believe that they speak the most about these kinds of situations.

Universities

12/23/2018

The borders of abroad

The day I was leaving for Edinburgh, I was expecting a major change in my life to occur. I thought that, back home, nothing will be the same again, that I will no longer be a part of life in Prague. I thought that everyone will slowly but surely forget about me as I’ll be starting a new life in a foreign environment. In other words I imagined the classical picturesque cliché of escape and new beginnings.

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