Letters from the IUAC Summer Training

Six weeks at the Inter-University Accelerator Centre. A junior reports back from New Delhi.

I am writing this from the guest house at IUAC. My notebook is full and my thumbs are sore from typing detector configs into a shared terminal.

The programme is what I was told it would be — and then more. I have plotted spectra I had only read about in class, and I have watched a beamline being tuned in real time.

The best hour of my day is the evening chai break, when the senior scientists sit down with the summer students and ask what we don't understand. They mean it.

I am coming home with two research questions and a lot of humility. Both feel like the right things to bring back to Palace Road.