Our trip to London at the beginning of the year…

What an amazing week! I don’t know how to start this blog, so many things to explain!

So many feelings and emotions throughout the classes of the last module have arisen such as happiness, sadness, confusion about the future, satisfaction, and nostalgia.

This last module was different from the others. Instead of doing classes at the University we went to London, earlier in the year, for the first three days of the week, to the McDonald’s Headquarters’. During this time, we received classes from different companies, not only McDonald’s professionals.

Many of them were former students of Agrifood courses, and it was really interesting listening to their experiences and journeys after their studies. I realised that there are many possible paths to follow after this current year.

During the week plenty of doubts and questions came up to my mind. We are almost halfway through the course and we should start thinking about… “What is next?”  To be honest, this scares me a little bit, but through the speeches of the different lecturers during this week I discovered new options that before I had not thought about before, and this gives me hope.

In addition, the talks from Dr. Bizhan Pourkomailian, who is the Global Restaurant and Distribution Food Safety Director at McDonald’s, were super and provided plenty of motivation and really encouraged us. I really appreciate his words and his personality, he is extremely friendly.

One of the afternoons in London, after ‘classes’, we visited Square Mile Farms, a rooftop farm and from my point of view, it was really impressive since it was the first time that I have seen a vertical farm! Apart from the futuristic facilities, the technology related to urban farming and how agriculture could change in this area, is another world that I would like to know better and explore. This makes me think about how we are going to face climate change, which techniques or which solution will give to this problem.

So you see, in just one week, a lot of questions emerged. Either to do with our personal lives or to do with the general world.

I would also like to mention how we all spent time together as classmates and professors. We definitely used staying in London to our advantage. We had a really great time together, having a drink, going shopping or having dinner all together in an Italian restaurant. This trip was a real opportunity to got to know each other better, outside the environment of classes. However, we were a little bit sad because we already knew that those days would be the last days that we were seeing each other day after another. 

So that was the end of our trip to London, as I said before, many different feelings, new things learned, new wonderful people met and awesome days spent with classmates and professors. I have only good things to say about our trip!

Now that we are back Cranfield another phase of the course will start, the Group Project, let’s see go it goes! I feel fully motivated to set out on this journey for the next two and a half months.