This week I was visiting Uppsala University's Faculty of Pharmacy with my colleagues from our School of Pharmacy (UEF) to strengthen teaching and research between the units. It was great to share experiences, the challenges in teaching and limitation and possibilities in the research. We really spoke the same language in many terms. And I must say that we were treated like Royals, so big thank you for the organizers! I hope we can meet soon in more concrete collaboration steps.
It its that time of the year that first students of this semester are done and finishing their lab work, like Heinileena. And at the same time, new ones are coming in, like Amandine from France, who will be accompanied by other 2 French student, Julie and Lucie next week. Anyway, even though it is always nice to get new fresh energy into the team, it is at the same time a bit sad to say goodbyes for those who are leaving. Once again, we are so grateful for Heinileena for her efforts with cysteine-prodrugs, which by the way were extremely difficult to synthesize and even more difficult to purify. But at the end, she was able to obtain couple of prodrugs that we can now study further. Somehow, I'm expecting that these prodrugs are not any easier to analyze... we will see!
Due to the Easter Break, which I hope everyone had a relaxing and happy one (many of us spended it on the ice obviously...) 😎, there has been shorter weeks and less happening in the research group. Well that's not fully true, everyone is working hard and producing results, of course, but there has been less things to write about lately. Or maybe my mind has also been occupied with so many things. We are suppose to submit 3-4 original papers and 1 review paper to the selected journals for evaluation within the next month or so! So there is a lot of things to be finalized.
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During the Easter Break I had also time to read a book, well lately I have tried to learn to listen the books (everyone who knows me, knows that I'm highly visual person, and focusing purely to listening without a visual aspect is really hard to me). Anyway, I listened a book written by a resigned coach of Finnish combined skiing team, Petter Kukkonen, a book named "Pettymyksen akatemia", which can be translated to "Anatomy of Frustration". In the beginning of the book, Petter says that it is a good guidance to any supervisor or teacher, but I must admit, it is also a good book for anyone who is receiving supervision or taught by another person. The book nicely encapsulates who difficult it is to give guidance and that there is always a third or fourth component that you cannot handle, even though your student has all the qualities to win the Olympic championship, but at the end, the team may fail. And it is totally ok and we should accept it. That's the point of the book. And I think that must be one aspect why Finnish people are considered to be so happy. We are not afraid to loose. Instead we can embrace the defeat. Unfortunately, this book is currently only in Finnish, but I hope it well be translated soon! For me at least, it was more eye-opening book that the similarly earlier written "Anatomy of Winning" by Aki Hintsa, which I felt that the conclusion were pretty obvious (I'm sorry, this is just my opinion). Practice hard, sleep well, eat well. Nothing new for those are are striving to success.
