It sounds crazy but today is exactly one year since I started my PhD in Karlsruhe. I have not always been happy during corona winter months, but we made it until here and finally it happened: some of the ESRs and supervisors met in person in September during two different conferences, first in Brno and later here, at home, in Karlsruhe.
Even though I could not manage to present my preliminary results in this year’s Computing in Cardiology, I already feel like this conference is our place to be. The environment of science and international friends feeling like a family has really conquered me. I could not have thought of a better moment for having the opportunity to get to know part of the PersonalizeAF family.
But the month does not end here! The week after CinC life did not come back to normality: Karlsruhe was going to be the host place for the Atrial Signals 2021 Conference… And with great power always comes a great responsibility! Which meant that the way of living this conference was not going to be 100% the same and now we were going to be the helpers (and responsible of technical issues if the hybrid conference was not working!), but everything worked perfectly and I have to say, that I was also enjoying being “the hosts”. Having so many people in your city getting to know your places, your institute, your colleagues, the restaurants you like to go… It was simply perfect. Of course we met also part of the PersonalizeAF people (some of them for the second time, some of them for the first one!) and most of the time it was not only us, but also our myAtria colleagues, the “older cousins” that we also had the opportunity to get to know better. Sharing debates, an OpenCARP workshop, social dinners, dances and of course, beers, we got closer as if it was not the first or second time that we see each other.
However, this time was not everything “just” social and organisational: I also presented my first poster in an international conference! With the results from the preliminary analysis of the catheter-sheath overlap effect I used all my (inexistent!) graphic design abilities and… voilà ! My first scientific baby is born! I had never been so proud of one PowerPoint file and I have to confess that now is hanging on in the wall of my office behind my back. So probably you will see it in the next online meeting (well, I hope not if that means that we are meeting in person!).
I promise that scientific life is not always like that. We work hard, we sleep few hours and sometimes we don’t even have weekends. But after this month I have the feeling that all is worth it if you can imagine a day in which a doctor is really using our help in the hospital. And I’m sure that this day is not as far away as we think. By the moment we will keep working for at least two more years to be able to say that personalised therapies for Atrial Fibrillation are closer to become a reality.
Have a nice start of October and… see you next month (I PROMISE!)
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Carmen
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