During this last months, as required by my ITN research project, I had to move outside my first University Institution, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, to my second one, Swansea University in Wales.
Honestly, the premises of moving from the warm Spain to the rainy United Kingdom where not encouraging, but the possibility of working on a different topic of my thesis face to face with Rubén, my supervisor based there, has been a challenge to me. Moreover, my ITN colleagues based in Swansea for those same months made me not overthink about the weather and start this part of my project wholehearted.
Now, that is more than two months that I am staying in Swansea I feel ready to make a balance and draw some conclusions on my experience. For sure, looking for a new accommodation, changing city, country and the people which share our everyday life is always stressful and might be a small shock at the beginning. Anyway once overcame it, after sometimes one can just remember about the numerous positive aspects of this adventure which increase our life experience and form us as the persons that we are. For instance, meeting new people, practicing a different language seeing new places…
Moreover, and most important, I think also that it is being really instructive in terms of jobs. For example, one can touch with his hands different working environments and different approaches and internalise the best from them. This is also useful in order to see our own work from another perspective which may help us to find what is missing in order to create the recipe of the perfect research.
In conclusion, I really think that doing a secondments is a fundamental step during a Phd thesis, first because of all the advantages that it may provide to our personal life and second to our attitude with respect our work and the way of doing research.