– Meeting my interviewer, future professors, international food science specialists, and the entire team that makes FIPDes happen: check.

– Embarrassing myself in public for a higher purpose-team building: check (thank you Cohort 8).

– Visiting a 100-year-old multi-national food product corporation (Danone): check.

– Standing 20 centimetres close to Hervé This and watching him give a molecular gastronomy demonstration up close: check.

First week into the FIPDes Master’s programme and I was already able to scratch so many things off my bucket list. That is just in-seine! (the Paris-adapted spelling of “insane”). Standing in a room full of accomplished professionals and renowned experts in the field definitely is overwhelming at first, but then chatting with them in a somewhat informal way transforms this feeling into utter pleasure and exhilaration. Getting more in-depth information about the second year academic paths from both the consortium members as well as the graduating class certainly made us fast-forward a year to visualize ourselves either back in Paris or boarding an airplane to Naples or Lund.
FIPDes week was a blast. I couldn’t have imagined a better start to the programme.
Attending Cohort 7’s graduation ceremony was just a bolus injection of joy for me, and I left the ceremony with this heavy sense of responsibility towards the world but also this strong feeling of hope that I could, similar to previous students, actually make a difference.