Or rather bootcamp. Or, if you (understandably) dislike the slight military overtones of the metaphor, call it a summer school or a hackathon instead….
This coming week I will be at the PolarRES Early Career Researcher (ECR) bootcamp for a few days. It’s being held at Søminestation, now a marine biology research station but also rented out for other academic activities, by Roskilde University Centre.
In a brilliant swords to ploughshares kind of theme, the station was originally owned by the Danish Ministry of Defence for developing and testing torpedoes. Happily, it’s now a place of sanctuary for busy scientists. It’s ridiculously idyllic, right on the edge of the fjord with a tiny beach which makes swimming easy and safe, lots of wildlife to enjoy and a recently renovated interior in impeccable Danish minimalist style.
The buildings are nestled in the forest with trails all around and it’s reached on quiet roads perfect for cycling. Food is delivered daily by a catering company and the bootcamp participants sort their own breakfast and lunches from a large assortment put out in turn by small groups. It’s a really perfect location for team building and reading weeks.
This is actually the 2nd bootcamp I’ve attended there. I organised the last one at the same place last October, in collaboration with many colleagues and fellow members on the NORP panel.
Then, the bootcamp subject was the Arctic and how well the CMIP6 global climate models (as used by the IPCC in their Sixth assessment report) represented the important processes. We had 23 students and 10 mentors, working on various aspects of this big problem for 10 days. We covered everything from sea ice to ocean circulation to atmospheric teleconnections to the Greenland ice sheet (natch).
They’re also exhausting. And I don’t think I was the only one who went home after 10 days last year and basically crashed for a week.
On the other hand, there will almost certainly come at least 3 publications from last year’s bootcamp. I wouldn’t be surprised if this year had a similar count. It’s a really brilliant way to get a lot of high quality work done in a short space of time.
It was overall a fantastic experience – albeit rather hectic, not least because we had to delay twice due to Corona, as did many other people so it was back to back with far too many other meetings. However I’d love to do another one, I find them incredibly stimulating and exciting from a scientific viewpoint. So I leaped at the opportunity to come back for a few days for the new PolarRES organised effort.
I will sadly not be attending the full week – I have family commitments- but I will lecture the first day (on “Hot topics in polar climate”: would love to hear your ideas on that in the comments…) And I’ll be around a few days to help support the group work as far as I can.
I’m mainly planning on using the time to prepare a talk for the IUGG meeting, and to write a draft paper. Both of these tasks already involve many of the early careerers at the bootcamp so it’s also a great opportunity for me to get a few things done.
It probably points to some of the problems in the working world, that I actually need to leave the office in order to get some work done…
Time to get back to the beach.
The beach at Søminestation:
“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Attributed to Isaac Newton (allegedly)
Sterna Paradisaea 