the good ole days of being a new PhD student

Yesterday I attended a session in the Academic teaching training course run by the Unit for teaching and learning here at Uppsala University. It was the English course so filled with participants from across the globe who are spending an extended time at the university and have some teaching responsibility. All lecturers/academics at the institution are mandated to attend at least 10 weeks of training in university teaching and learning. And PhD students with teaching responsibility have to complete at least five weeks of training. So it happened that the majority of those in the course yesterday were PhD students.
I was immediately reminded of those early days at the OU and the PhD skills training we were required to attend. The people I met; the diverse, strange, opinionated and interesting characters who were for the most part hugely enthusiastic about their research and firmly believed they were the best and brightest and that their research were going to change the world. Looking back on that heady period in late 2008 and my fellow PhD students (I have a photo of the group somewhere), I realise what a wonderful, open time it was - almost filled with a optimistic sense of the intellectual and interpersonal possibilities that can exist when you bring together some twenty odd, relatively smart but very different people and ask then to engage and learn together.