Wetskills South Korea 2022-
by Alejandra Ibarra Felix, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology
As usual, the day started early in the morning with a nice coffee and a scramble egg sandwich with my dear roommate Lucia, while making a recap about how nice our trip to Hongdae was and how much stuff we bought. After a while, Ligaya joined us for both the conversation and the breakfast. We then headed to the classroom to start the day with the Wetskills team.
Floor and Charlie prepared meetings with the 3 teams for feedback about our action plan and also gave some encouraging and motivating words. This reunion really helped our team to ground and redirect our research.
After a nice lunch with Team 2 at the University’s cafeteria, we faced the actual Wetskills challenge: the “brain hurricane”. Here, we had the opportunity to speak and discuss with 4 different experts from different areas (mostly water treatment) about our projects. The dynamic consisted in asking as many questions related to our challenge as we could, in 12 minutes, with each expert. Yes, only 12 minutes, that is why it is called a hurricane and not a storm. I can see why they gave us some energy drinks. It was quite interesting and challenging, and each team could discover different points of views from the professors. We also found out that they do not only dominate their field of research but other disciplines or topics, which was very inspiring. I am sure we all learned a lot from them and from this dynamic despite the short time.
To clear our heads and go back to normal life after some brain frying, we had the much wanted Korean fried chicken! Our nice korean chungu (friends in korean ;)) took us to this nice place where we got different types of chicken, along with some beer and fun conversations.
To conclude, although today was a rushed and energy consuming day, we are very happy that the Wetskills team gave us the opportunity to learn from experts, to have a better idea on what direction we should take to complete the challenge, to organize our ideas and to find our main goal. Everyday has been different from the other and yet so fun and enlightening.
