Some of the best conversations don’t happen in a seminar room but outside during a hike or – in this case – a climb. This week, the new EAGLE students got a chance to prove it, swapping lecture slides for climbing shoes at our bouldering social.
We booked the Rock-In bouldering gym exclusively for four hours. The new students were joined by lecturers, and quite a few older EAGLEs. There was plenty of chatting, plenty of EO talk between attempts on the wall, and a fair amount of falling onto mats, and succeeding after a few attempts.
It’s a simple format, but it works. Nobody is presenting anything, and nobody is the expert on a fresh route, so the usual hierarchies melt away pretty quickly. You learn more about a person while they’re stuck halfway up a problem than you do in a week of group assignments.
The first enthusiastic boulder groups formed on the spot, and a few students were properly hooked after their very first session. That’s good news for the coming weeks and months, because a regular excuse to get out of the seminar room and clear your head is something an intense MSc program can use.
Thanks to everyone who came and climbed. We’ll do this again, and we’re pretty sure the new group will be back at the gym well before we organize the next one.