Reading time: 4 minutes With some exceptions, 2018 was a hell of a year.

The year was going just fine. I had obtained some nice results for my masters, managed to do get very interesting advancements at work and my personal life was just fine. In parallel, at the beginning of the year, I had applied to a PhD position, though I had little hope to be selected. Months passed due to the lengthy process, and I kept following what I had planned for the year. For a week in May, the institute funded all applicants that reached the last stage of the selection process to come to Paris for several interviews, among other activities. By this point, I was already happy, regardless of the result. The experience allowed me to open my eyes to several subjects I today deem very important and gave me an opportunity to meet some amazing people. My memory is not the best but there were people from the United States, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Poland, Hungary, Estonia, India, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, China, Taiwan, and probably other countries that I can not remember of now.