“This is me!” Series: A Land Down Under

“He just smiled and gave me a Vegemite sandwich…”

When I was a teenager I got a piece of paper and wrote “things I want to do in my life”, and at the very top was “go to Australia”. My mother found this paper few weeks before I was moving to Australia and she came to me with the paper and a highlighter in her hand and said: “You should probably cross this one!”.

But the funny thing is that coming to Australia started with a “joke”. My Masters’ supervisor was going to Australia as a visiting professor, and one day in a coffee break he was telling us how excited he was and I said: “You could get me a Ph.D. over there”. We laughed and that was it. At night on that very same day, I was replying to the email of my (now) Ph.D. supervisor about the ideas for a research proposal.

Take-home message can be both: Be careful - or not - with the things you ask for others because it might become true!

After almost 3 years in Australia and a world pandemic, now it is time to face the world again, try to find new opportunities, and make more dreams become true.