The student seminar in 2024 was the final student seminar I attended—the fifth one—since my first year as a master’s student up to my third year in the doctoral program. At this stage, as a third-year doctoral student, I was no longer required to give a presentation. Instead, my role shifted to serving as a chairman, timekeeper, or mic runner, rotating these responsibilities with several other third-year doctoral students at each session change.

Being a chairman was not particularly difficult. The main responsibility was to listen carefully to each presentation and then ask questions about points that were unclear or insufficiently explained. The questions could range from very basic to slightly more complex ones. However, since the student seminar was attended by students from a wide variety of research fields, it was only natural that some fundamental concepts or technical details were not fully understood by everyone. As a result, basic questions were actually quite common, and this was considered perfectly normal in the seminar setting.

Overall, this final student seminar felt the most relaxed compared to all the previous ones I had participated in. This was not because the role was unimportant, but rather because the pressure to “demonstrate results” was no longer there. At the same time, this period came with a different kind of challenge. For us third-year doctoral students planning to graduate in March of the following year, the focus had already shifted to preparing for the first doctoral defense, which had to be completed before the end of December.