Last Autumn

The principal change from last year has certainly been me preparing my dissertation thesis. I am very lucky to be supervised by a great professor who pushes me intellectually and welcomes my often-unconventional ideas, thus making me figure out different approaches in solving my question concerning generative adversarial networks. Apart from that, the variety of subjects we can chose this semester has never been so broad. With subjects ranging from Women in the Global Economy to topology, which I really enjoy, the School went out of its way in trying to accommodate almost everyone’s academic tastes.

In October, I had the opportunity to visit the University of Oxford through a short internship I had at the Ludwig Institute where I worked on a bioinformatics project mapping positions of UV-induced CPD lesions with respect to closest nucleosomes.  This was a great opportunity for me to have a taste of what is a life of a doctorate student at Oxford like. Albeit too short for my liking, my internship was rather intense. First, I had to read up on relevant literature concerning the field of study. This proved to be a difficult task as understanding bioinformatic jargon took me a couple of days. Next, I tried to apply information to the task at hand. I was lucky to have met extremely motivated and intelligent scientists, who were always eager to help me and overall maintained a very friendly atmosphere at the Institute. The stay gave me a lot of insight both in terms of informatics and biology. Once it was over, I had to present my findings in front of a panel of scientists, who were obviously, unlike me, well-versed in the field of study and who did not hesitate in asking me pernickety details about the work I did. Luckily, I survived and heard kind words about my work even from the principal investigator of the group.

The first semester has been flying swiftly by and I still can’t come to terms with being in my final year.

Autumnal Edinburgh

Programming Society’s first meet-up