I’ll tell you something – before heading off to New York City, I wasn’t that excited. I had been to NYC before and thought that it’s too big, too loud, too crowded. But it happened that Yaacov Trope, the researcher I wanted to work with, is at New York University. I thought “Well, living in New York City for half a year is not the worst thing that can happen to you”. When the plane took off on August 22nd 2018 and I miraculously got upgraded to business class, I was joking that this would set the tone for my time there. Turns out that it actually did.

Some of the notable events of my stay (and these are just the work-related ones):

• Finding my apartment, which was a 10 min walk away from NYU (only affordable thanks to the SNSF grant I received, and it still had roaches)
• Presenting four times in the Trope lab and receiving incredibly valuable feedback every single time
• Being invited to give a talk at Princeton University and catching up with the people I had worked with in 2014
• Visiting Tom Gilovich and his lab at Cornell University (this time by bus, so that American Airlines didn’t have a chance to lose my suitcase again and make me present in leggings and sneakers)
• Attending the SESP conference in Seattle (see also my earlier blog post) and the SPSP conference in Portland
• Being able to attend seminars, talks, and journal clubs at the NYU Stern School of Business, which led to a research project with Adam Alter and Yaacov

I would like to thank Yaacov and his lab members, NYU, the SNSF, and my great colleagues in Basel for making this experience possible! (and for enduring numerous Skype calls with lousy sound quality …)

“New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it: Once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough.” – John Steinbeck