Physics Groups Are Like Family

This is my first blog post of the summer and I wanted to focus on something that we as a group have come to enjoy as part of our experience here in Würzburg, Germany. Over the past two weeks we’ve come to explore the town and see some of the historical sites, enjoy the local gelato and food, and found time to get involved in our areas of research across the campus. The one thing that continually comes up in our conversations is the interactions we’ve had with the members of our research groups who have made each of us feel at home here. I personally was feeling anxious about how I would integrate into a group of researchers here for only two and a half months, and possibly some others of our summer group were feeling the same.

To my surprise, from the day I first arrived at the physics building on-campus to meet Experimental Physics VII, the research group I would be working with, I was warmly welcomed by everyone and was soon getting to know each member in the group. It didn’t matter that I was only working with two members (Dr. Thiago Peixoto and Henriette Maaß) out of the entire group of 16 and that I would only be there for the summer. In their eyes I was one of them and in less than a week I felt that I felt completely at home. This included not only me diving into the quantum spectroscopy research I was doing (which I will blog about soon), but also being taken to each member’s lab to learn about their own research and area of physics interest.

It’s sometimes hard to pin down what makes a group of people a family. Some think that it’s purely based on familial ties, and others think that it’s something that can be made with anyone over time. For me, a family is a group of people who value you, trust you, and bring the feeling of inclusion into their daily lives. And that was exactly how I felt after my brief time thus far with EP VII. Each day began with hellos throughout the office, along with inquiries into each others’ weekends, and then at 11:30 one member would go around and knock on everyone’s doors to see if they were ready for lunch. Then as a collective we would walk across campus to the Mensa, our cafeteria, and talk and laugh the whole way there. And this banter would continue throughout the entire lunch with conversations ranging on all topics of life from research and physics news to movies and campus life.

What really stood out to me was the after lunch event, where everyone meets in a conference room and have coffee together while chatting and laughing continuously. This would continue for another half-hour or so and then everyone would go on to work, with each person seeming refreshed and ready to continue their work. Now, there are two things that I want to point out here:

1) Most of the conversations are in German, and I have zero proficiency in the language. So I have NO IDEA what is being said most of the time. However, this never detracted from my experience because I was never left out, with at least one or two people wanting to talk to me and ask about my life in the States and what I thought of Germany, or with one of them translating the group conversation so that I could follow along.

2) There was not a single cell phone present. Everyone was so focused on the general conversation or on talking to someone. There was no division of attention from a human being and everyone was genuinely interested in each others’ lives. It was so refreshing to experience this where in the States so many people can’t put their phone down and give the person they’re with the attention they deserve.

Now I write this from my own perspective, but whenever our summer group gets together to catch up or when we chat on Facebook we continuously talk about what’s going on in our research groups, the people in them, and what food some member brought to the after lunch coffee break for the group to enjoy. It truly has felt like we’ve been accepted into the working lives of the people here at the physics department at Würzburg and I personally feel like I’m part of a physics family here. It’s a stark change from the life of an undergraduate student at UT Austin and I’m glad that this is what awaits me in my future graduate student life.

Today was especially amazing in witnessing the extent of family here. It started with me getting to the office I share with Henriette Maaß and meeting a member that I haven’t seen in the group yet. Her name was Sina Gusenleitner and she was finishing up her Ph.D thesis, which meant that she had been mainly at home writing it up for the past few weeks. And although she had been gone for so long, everyone in the groups came by to say hi and catch up with her, and it was like she had never been gone at all. Next, after lunch we came back to the conference room for coffee to find that one member of the group had group homemade cheesecake, strawberry cake, and cupcakes for everyone to enjoy. We feasted for an additional hour, and then attempted to get back to work, only to find out that due to the exceptionally hot day (even in the building) some members had made liquid nitrogen ice cream! And so we shared delicious, cold, and creamy ice cream together. All in all not much work was done that day, but it was a wonderful day to share with my research group.

And that brings me to my final point of my post, which is that this summer group that I am a part of, the collection of individuals you see posting on this blog writing about our lives in Würzburg, is becoming something very similar to a sort of family and I’m looking forward to our continued adventures in research and exploring Würzburg.
That’s all for now and stay tuned for more blog posts from this group! My next post will be concerning the quantum spectroscopy research I am doing under Dr. Thiago Peixoto and Henriette Maaß. Until then, tschüss!