Every year, ten international scholarship holders from all corners of the globe come to the Alfred Wegener Institute’s two island-based sites. The POGO-Nippon Foundation Centre of Excellence trains them to become oceanography experts.
![[Translate to English:] Online Teaching](/fileadmin/_processed_/1/a/csm_online_teaching_50f7f3d9af.jpg "Online Teaching")
The journey from western Mexico to Helgoland takes a good three days – and can take one or two days longer if a storm blows up. This is followed by an isolation period. As such, before Alejandra de Jesus Castillo Ramirez can meet her fellow researchers in person for the first time, and not just see them on a computer screen, another 14 days go by.
Since 2013, every year ten young scholars from around the globe have come together at the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) sites on Helgoland and Sylt to complete a ten-month training programme in modern oceanographic methods. Here the ten scholars, who were selected from over 100 applicants in May 2020, find their scientific ‘host family’ for the duration of their stay. With the global spread of the coronavirus, we felt that is was important to continue to offer young people future prospects. As with many things during the pandemic, the way the programme is run had to be adapted.
Since the scholars’ journey here was much more difficult and had to be planned well in advance, for the first time the programme began with the theoretical content being taught online. Potential travel routes and hygiene concepts were developed in close cooperation with the responsible authorities, to ensure that the participants could travel safely. Eight of them, hailing from Mexico, Brazil, India, the Philippines, Peru, Tanzania, Mauritius and Vietnam, have since arrived on Helgoland. Fernanda Matos, Mark Tolentino and Mouneshwar Soondur arrived just in time to experience snow for the first time in their lives.
Now the practical research and teaching part of the course can begin on site. Along with personal networking, collaborating and actively participating in scientific working groups are key to the success of this prestigious programme. That being the case, our current priority is to get the remaining two scholarship holders, from Papua New Guinea and Fiji, to Helgoland as quickly as possible. In the course of the current programme so far, the internet connection has mostly been stable enough, even to get to know each other a bit outside the teaching sessions. When the link to Shilpa Lal in Fiji, or to Goriga Gwaibo in Papua New Guinea is occasionally interrupted by a cyclone, the other participants and the instructors are once again reminded of the distance that lies between them. Accordingly, everyone hopes that the team will soon be complete.