 My name is Rico Pohle and I graduated from OIST in December 2017 with a PhD in theoretical physics. Since I was an undergrad or even before I was interested in magnetism, I wanted to understand where this mysterious force is coming from. If you look in the history of magnetism, people knew about magnetism for more than 6,000 years. But nobody could really explain it until the proper development of quantum mechanics. We are able to explain conventional magnets. The magnets everybody has on average and everybody knows. But there are also some new types of magnets, unconventional magnets, which we try to understand with modern numerical techniques. I grew up in Dresden, a very nice and beautiful city in the eastern part of Germany. During my life in Dresden, I started practicing karate when I was 14 years old. Since this time, karate was actually part of my life. Also my first encounter with Japanese culture, Japanese language and also Japanese martial arts. For me, karate and physics is very similar because I think karate is your own little physics experiment on yourself. And it's very similar to a physics experiment. After I graduated from OIST, I took the opportunity to come to the University of Tokyo. So I took a post-doc position at the University of Tokyo. And after this, since my supervisor moved from the University of Tokyo to the Vaseda University, I'm now stationed at Vaseda University. My life in Tokyo is nice. It's a very huge city. I quite enjoy that. I really like the vital aspect. Everybody is working very hard. Everybody wakes up early, goes to work in this dynamic. I can feel every day which motivates me to work hard as well. And I feel that everybody takes a lot of care of me or other non-Japanese members in the lab. Due to the fact that we are not as proficient in the Japanese language and written in spoken form as Japanese people. So we have some kind of special status, if you want to say. However, I like to include myself and try to use this as a challenge to improve my Japanese. So research environment in OIST is very, I would say, special for Japan. It's very international, one of the most international institutions in Japan. After I came from OIST to the mainland, I recognized how international it actually is. I would like to see OIST be nicely connected with institutions in the mainland Japan. And I hope OIST could be a nice opportunity for people from Japan entering OIST, going to foreign countries. And vice versa too, people coming from foreign countries entering OIST and then going into other institutions in the mainland Japan.