So this week we have all been recovering from a hectic week of: firstly, preparing for the funder’s meeting and then actually going to France for the meeting! We have a number of different funder’s who fund the Stratigrad programme and usually all of them come to Imperial College for the bi-annual meetings. However this time, the meeting was held at Servier Laboratories in Orleans, France.
We prepared our slides in a ‘PechaKucha‘ style presentation and had a few practices before we headed off – if you haven’t heard of this type of presenting yet, definitely look it up…It takes a lot of practice, trust me!
Our meet
ing was on a Friday but first we had to get to Orleans. So, we all met early Thursday morning at St. Pancras and started the trip off with a lovely tall glass of bubbly – yum!
Then, all 15 of us piled onto the Eurostar train and after a little post bubbly snooze, we were in Paris (so quick!). Then onto a not
so fast train, we got to Orleans safe and sound late afternoon. We arrived at the hotel, had a delicious meal with our hosts and kept it to an early night so we were ready for the meeting the next day.
The meeting was held in at Servier Laboratories and our meeting room was in the style of a church with high vaulted ceilings – very grand. The presentations went swimmingly and there was lots of interest from our funder’s with the research and they seem extremely happy with our progress since the last meeting. Win!
Luckily for us, we have very nice supervisors who said that we could postpone our Eurostar return ticket to Sunday! Of course all of us said ‘yes please!’ and we all stayed in Paris for the rest of the weekend. The weather was incredible and it felt like we walked the whole of Paris! So many beautiful sights to see!
