Experiences during the month of March

Hi, everybody!

Last month was a very busy and exciting one. During the week of March 5-13 we had a period of recess, known as Spring Break. As we did not have classes during this week it was a great opportunity to travel a little bit. I spent the weekend in Miami and then I went to New York where I had an amazing one-week stay. If you don’t know where to go next summer, these are two wonderful cities to visit!

Besides my tourist experience, this month was also full of other learning experiences. I have been attending some interesting seminars. The last one was about “Common capacity limits in visual selection and working memory storage”. I have also been meeting with PhD students working in the field of writing research. The courses I am attending have been very fruitful, too. I have been learning a lot about the education in US, which is a little bit different from ours, in Portugal. In another course, I had the opportunity to present the proposal of the first study of my PhD. We had a great scientific discussion and the feedback I received was very important and relevant to my work. Finally, the Academic Writing course has been surpassing my initial expectations. Besides the fantastic teacher and friendly classmates, it has been very useful to improve my scientific writing skills and to know better cultural issues related to writing. For instance, in the last class we discussed “email etiquette”, that is, how to be effective in composing emails.

Although my GEDS experience is approaching the end, I still have one more month in Vanderbilt. Until now, my experience in here has been absolutely amazing. Nevertheless, I suspect that this last month will be even more interesting because I will meet some leading researchers in the field of writing research. It will be a great opportunity to discuss my PhD and the work we are developing in Portugal.

I didn’t have the time to take some photos of the flowering trees that decorate Vanderbilt, but this beautiful dolphin can be equally inspiring! The photo was taken at the Miami Seaquarium.