The night before I left, Pittsburgh put on a show. The sunset outside my window was one of those rare ones that stops you mid-thought — all orange and gold bleeding across the skyline. My best friend came over that evening, and kept me company as I did almost all of my packing in the last possible hours. He put on a 9/11 documentery that tweaked me out the night before I had my first cross ocean flight.
Hi! I’m Corin Winikoff, a sophomore physics major at the University of Pittsburgh’s Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences and the Frederick Honors College. This summer I had the opportunity to travel to Berlin, Germany as part of Pitt’s Bioscience Breakthroughs program — and for someone who had never left the country before, it felt like I was in starwars exploring tatooine.
Why Berlin? Part of the answer is personal: I have family there who I hadn’t seen since before COVID, and the chance to reconnect with them made this trip feel meaningful before it even started. But the academic pull was just as strong. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what actually makes a scientific breakthrough happen — not just the discovery itself, but everything underneath it. The infrastructure, the funding, the team size, the timing. Can breakthroughs be planned? Is there an optimal number of people or dollars that makes one more likely? These are questions I’ve been sitting with for a while, and Berlin felt like exactly the right place to start looking for answers.
My interest sits at an unusual intersection: I study physics, but I’m deeply fascinated by how biomedical breakthroughs happen — because I think the patterns translate. Particularly in fields like quantum computing, I want to understand when a field is genuinely on the verge of something transformative, and when it’s riding a funding bubble that’s about to pop. Spending time immersed in world-class bioscience research felt like a rare chance to train that eye.
Beyond the science, I came to Berlin curious about something harder to quantify. I wanted to understand how people in another country experience life — what they value, how they think about education, how they’re grappling with the rise of AI. I wanted to come home a little different than when I left. To have my assumptions challenged and my perspective widened in ways I couldn’t fully predict before boarding the plane.
I also really wanted to eat some german chocolate.
