why you should go to a max planck institute?
tl,dr: because the intellectual level is over 9000
1
so i was accepted in an advanced course in a max planck institute in rostock, their guest house is incredible, they provide me a working space in the library (i sit next to a bunch of econometrica :D). the wall is made of glass because they clearly know the advantage of locating along a riverside. the sunset is marvellous because it's autumn and the river always whispers something gracefully to the wind. they have a salad and fruit bar which is an incredible invention of human being. they grant me travel, accommodation and even per diem.
there is a small forest in the middle of the city so you can just choose to walk across the rainfall of read leaves or you can walk along the river to go home. yes, just to go home.
there is an old prison (museum) of the old time that we visited today. it's a narrow place and i imagine prisoners walking around here maybe 50 years ago. they're identified as enemy of the state, being reported by secret informers that might be their own relatives. i realise the potraits of stalin, marx and lenin on the wall. oh wait they are beloved godfathers of our country :D lenin showed love and humanity to a particular class of people, too. then i thought, but western soldiers came to our land and sometimes when they didnt have anything to do in an afternoon, they'd just go out and shooting random kids on the rice field as a version of "angry birds" on an ipad today. so how do we know we are not lunatics? is there objective criteria for that so i can avoid to be a lunatic? maybe if we do something that is wrong, a good sign is that i may have to destroy evidence in fear of being exposed? but a good person can do that in fear of a brutal revenge from a dictator state too, so we never know.
and a war is actually a very structured and carefully crafted plan, justified by the most sensible reasons ever invented. they strive for best practices, automate as much as possible, improvise and optimize the design of the prison, make a very logical and rational procedure of holding prisoners and putting them on trials. very often, the most lunatic killers are the most rational humans and you'd be amazed by their consistent train of thoughts.
anyway, we went around to see cells, dark rooms, shower room.. but we werent able to see the small yard because the only stair leading to that is under construction. that's a pity for me because i kinda want to see what hope feels like. the prison is a narrow space and scary, and sometimes the prisoners would be allowed to be in the small yard (though it's caged and walled, guarded by armed officers) and they can look up to see the sky through the iron bars. maybe something would happen in the sky, like a bird, or some clouds. i'd like to stand in that place and try that feeling, of seeing a cloud to happen.
anyway, i love them - the course organisers.
2
5 euro from rostock and after work you can chase the sun by train till the baltic sea and watch it set over the horizon. the cold sea has a very different blue from the sea in vietnam, it looks greyer, some blue grey color of melancholy and it doesnt even look like a sea, it looks like a bluish mattress running toward the infinite horizon. the sky dome above is unbearably cyanish blue with coconut clouds and colorful kites topping. and it's the beach that makes it look like you are watching the whole thing through a fish eyed lens: the beach is too large.
as an equator citizen, no one ever told me before that the sun can move in a trajectory of only 1/4 arc up in the sky and it can have different trajectory for autumn and summer. i was like "holy shit this can't happen, what are you talking about, the sun is supposed to be directly above my head at noon, my entire life is a lie"
i love it - the rostock sun.
3
what is even better is that they organise a very dense concentration of intellectuality from different discipline. imagine a room of people coming from different part of the world, having their own experience in their real work (emphasis real!), so each time there is a question raised or issue open, we can hear different spontaneous comment intuitively coming from their itchy subconscious minds, and all these are gems.
i love them - the participants.
4
the instructors are also wonderfully formidable and hardworking. they connect incredible things together. the whole world just suddently make sense while the rostock sun shines through the glass windows. i love the 45 degree angle of the sun on the floor, glazing over the table, the papers.. each instructor has a domain specific knowledge in something and when they speak about that, beautiful things show up on the board, i was very much convinced that statistics and econometrics have such a beautiful insight (yes, i was ignorant and extremely hated these two). they shape me again. now everyone leaving rostock will see everything as a stochastic process, everything coming from some distribution, and the whole world as agent based model... i really cannot unsee those stuff out of my eyes !!!
i love them - the instructors
5
they give me 30 minutes to speak about what i do in their workshop and i honestly hope i'll not screw up. smart people ask smart questions, and i'm both eager and fear these questions coming from them :p (i ask quite a lot so i hope they dont try to return the favor while i'm on the roast). anyway, you feel the thickness of intellectuality in the air you try to breath in while your adrenaline rush pushes you to think of something clever. my point is that maybe you are fine on your own but dont underestimate the effect of a highly stimulating environment. it blows my mind away. and it'll do yours.
their intranet portal is incredibly smooth, merit-based big funding available all the time (:D). they have very good policy. the incredible thing about max planck institute is that they have many institutes and in each there are focus research groups in which you can be very particular. for example, there is a research group about eurasia which have many focus study on vietnam, china.. they also have many other focus groups about very modern topics in the world also.
i love it - the environment
so try to get to one of these,
soon as you can
rostock <3