Back from Leipzig

Well, the Congress is over and after a very long and very weird train ride, first there was someone who decided to jump in front of another train, which led do a 45 minute delay and after that, some Idiot decided it would be a good Idea to forget his suitcase within the train. And since some other Idiots decided to fly two airplanes into some buildings 10 years ago, a forgotten suitcase in a train is a case for the police. To make a long story short: I arrived in Mainz with a total delay of around two hours yesterday and was as exhausted as I was the days before.

The conference itself was great. I’ll have to admit that I thought I would be able to participate in the discussions there, but I saw pretty quickly that most of the other People there were on a completely different level then I was. This bothered me for quite some time, but then I realised that, as an undergraduate student, I don’t need to know all this stuff by now. So instead of showing off my tremendous knowledge (which I didn’t had) I started to enjoy listening to the stuff other people said and there was a lot of really interesting stuff going on.
In the end, the days in Leipzig were a very exhausting, intimidating and humbling experience, but I’m glad I went there. I saw how much stuff I still need to learn to really understand this field but I also realised that I really want to learn all this stuff. The last days gave me even more motivation to continue my studies so that maybe by the same time next year, I have something to present at the next ESHE Meeting, or somewhere else.
I’ll try to write about some of the stuff I heard in Leipzig within in the next weeks and there’s also this stuff about Australopithecus sediba which I wanted to write. I hope to get this Post done within this week.

At last I want to thank Anna Barros and Tracy Kivell who were both kind enough to answer a bunch of my questions and listened to some of my weirder thoughts during the Poster session on Friday.

Eric in Leipzig: Lessons from the first day

Scientific congresses are, especially if you're a little student a place to learn a lot of new stuff. So far I learned the following lessons:

1st Lesson: Don't be cheap.

I wanted to save 12,50€ for an addional night in a bed in a cheap hostel and decided to arrive at Leipzig the day the conference started. Only Problem: The conference started at 10am. This forced me to spend my night in a train, which lead to the nice fact, that I had around 1 hour of sleep in the night from Wednesday to Thursday.

2nd Lesson: Don't attend to a course on geometric morphometrics when you're deprived of sleep.

Lesson 1 leads directly to Lessen 2. I remember some of the stuff that was mentioned in this course yesterday but the most parts of it, and I think those were the more important parts, I forgot about five minutes after they were told.

3rd Lesson: Speak more english!

I think that I understand english fairly well, be it spoken or written. I think I'm also able to write in english in a at least partially understandable way. But my spoken english is abyssimmal. I have next to zero practice in speaking english and therefore my pronounciation is just bad and unsophistacated. And as you might guess, it's pretty hard to ask intelligent questions if hearing yourself speaking gives you nausea.

Well, those are the lessons I learned yesterday. I also learned something anthropological, but nothing of it is related to this congress and besides, I learn something about Anthropology almost all the time.

Let's see what interesting stuff happens today.

P.S.: I'm pretty sure, the english in this post isn't very good as well. But please keep in mind that it's around 7am and I'm still a little bit tired.