Since my last blog post, I’d like to think that I’ve officially become a local. I’ve visited all the major museums in the city, taken an entire weekend journey without using GPS and stopped using the Oxford comma. The last being maybe the most jarring milestone. Work has also become more routine, with my mindset shifting from day to day to week by week. This might explain how the time has seemed to fly and take me midway through my penultimate week as an intern at King’s.

I’ve now spent a second week with Organizational Development, where I supported various events and attended a mentorship masterclass that I plan to put to use as I continue to work as a teaching assistant. The week after, I spent with the learning management team. The system is where managers upload the paperwork for their employees’ yearly evaluations, and it goes through an audit every year just before the evaluations are due. My job was to create a report from the system, message those without a manager listed, and then update the system. This was a rather repetitive task but allowed me to practice data management and have some conversations with important people in the trust. It was quite the shock to find myself messaging on Microsoft Teams, a more personal method of communication than email, with the CPO, whose manager turns out to be the CEO.

That Friday, I was fortunate enough to spend the day with a professional development nurse from the Ophthalmology department. They arranged for me to spend the first half of the day shadowing a vitreoretinal surgeon and the second half at the King’s Rapid Eye Service (KRES). This was an amazing experience, getting to spend another day in an NHS operating room and in clinic. The surgeon performed two vitrectomies to repair detached retinas in two medically complex patients. This surgery involves removing some of the gel from the space within the eye, lasering the retina, and using cryotherapy to weld the retina onto the back of the eye. An already complex surgery was made more difficult by the two patients having other chronic and acute health problems, mainly preventing the surgeon from positioning them in the usual way. It was inspiring both personally and professionally to see the clinical and surgical skills the two physicians I followed demonstrated.

I spent both of the last two weekends at a museum on Saturday and a nature-related attraction on Sunday. The first Saturday I visited the Tate Modern, a prominent museum of contemporary art. My favorite pieces from the museum were a replica of Fountain by Marcel Duchamp and Gadzi by Nora Chipaumire. Fountain is a piece that I learned about and wrote about in an art class at Pitt. Made by Duchamp, it proved his theory that institutions act as gatekeepers of art and culture when it was rejected from an open exhibition. Gadzi is a massive environment made of paper mache rock structures and large speakers bathed in warm orange light. Made to mimic the artist’s native country of Zimbabwe, chimurenga music plays over the speakers. The sound of music and viewers’ conversations echo in the decommissioned oil tank in the basement of the museum’s former power station home.

That Sunday, I took multiple trains out to Richmond, an outer borough of London, to see the Royal Botanical Gardens. The gardens consist of multiple large greenhouses in a 300-acre manicured park. It has been named the most biodiverse place on Earth and contains many plant and seed specimens, some of which were brought back by Darwin on his trip around the world, developing his theory of evolution. I felt very in tune with my biology major on this outing.

Last weekend, my museum of choice was the Victoria and Albert Museum, and my nature trip was to the Royal Observatory Greenwich and the Prime Meridian. I’ve got a lot to say about both of these locations (you’ve been warned), but I will begin with the observatory.

I couldn’t let myself leave London without visiting the Prime Meridian, mostly because it’s such a strange place to actually see in person and not a map, and because it has a connection to Pittsburgh. Cutting a lot of long stories short, clocks used to be terrible at maintaining calibration when on ships, which led to difficulty in determining your longitude. An English inventor was the first to invent a chronometer that would accurately display the time on long ocean journeys. Remembering that the British Navy was largely responsible for establishing and maintaining the Empire, accurate time was hugely important. This also led to the observatory being used as a meridian by astronomers in Britain and later worldwide. With the observatory being established as 0′ longitude, each day was then precisely measured to begin when a “clock star” passed through the lens of a stationary telescope there. To mark time for ships on the Thames and nearby locals, a large red ball similar to the New Year’s Eve ball has dropped on the roof of the observatory daily at 13:00. Unfortunately, even with my phone giving me the most accurate measure of time an individual has ever experienced in the history of the world, I arrived at the observatory exactly one minute too late to witness the ball drop.

However, just visiting the meridian and getting to see the observatory was special since I’ve also visited its partner in America. The Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh acted in a similar capacity by marking the official time for the US. Before its inception, there was no standardized system of timekeeping for the country, and like how ships in the UK benefited from the presence of the standard time, trains in the US were harmed by its absence. In short, they tended to crash into each other if their times were off. This was solved with the Allegheny Observatory, which used clock stars to mark the exact time and then sell it to the railway and local jewelers for use in their trains and their clocks. Selling the time is now an obsolete idea, but these two institutions in London and Pittsburgh were instrumental in the success of each country.

The Victoria and Albert Museum was extremely interesting to visit due to the variety of artifacts it has on display. There are art and sculptures, but also historical artifacts from the UK. This includes furniture, clothing, household goods, entire walls of old rooms, and luxury items like jewelry and tapestries. Seeing all of the different items that were on display, not even those that are in the archives, reminded me of a revelation that I’ve had during my trip: the British Empire was much wealthier than I realized. This is still obvious when walking through the city or any of its free museums. London society exists overshadowed by ornate buildings and caches of more luxurious artifacts that can be displayed. Visiting a culture so in touch with its powerful past is both similar but also different from the US. It has been interesting learning more about this past and observing the positive and negative ways it impacts society today.

Looking forward, I am currently working with the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion team at King’s and will wrap up my global program in the UK with Employee Wellbeing next week. It’s both welcome and a bit sad that I’ll soon be leaving, but my time abroad has definitely formed me into a better, more aware, and more confident version of myself.