With only one week left after this one, I went into Week 5 laser-focused on powering through everything still on my plate. The heatwave was still very much in effect and made it genuinely hard to concentrate, but I was grateful that, unlike my flat, the office has proper AC, so I made the most of every hour I could spend there. I made great headway on the database, finishing the first two tabs and moving on to the third and fourth. Much like with the HPQ, I've now been asked to present my findings to the team next week, so I've started sketching out what that presentation will look like even as I keep building.

I also got to help out at another class at the Courtauld Gallery, where I watched a new group of HPQ students present their project pitches. Sitting in the audience for that felt different from anything else I've done this summer. It was incredibly satisfying to watch them come full circle: nervous, uncertain researchers just a few weeks ago, now standing in front of a room speaking confidently about their own ideas. What made it even more meaningful was finding out that some of the resources I'd submitted to the HPQ database earlier this summer were already being used as teaching material, and that several students had picked pieces I'd researched and written up as objects for their own art exhibitions. Watching them take an idea I'd developed and run somewhere completely their own with it made this whole placement feel real in a way it hadn't quite before. It's one thing to build a resource, it's another to watch someone actually use it to think.

The other highlight of the week came from my supervisor, who was invited to an educators' night for a new exhibition, Nomenclature for the Time Being, at Raven Row Art Gallery, and asked me to come along as her plus-one. (Here's the exhibition if you're curious: https://ravenrow.org/home.) After work, we headed over together, and the evening turned into something much more special than I expected: we got to sit in on curators and researchers talking through the ideas behind the show, and afterward received a private tour of the exhibition itself. The whole thing was genuinely thought-provoking, weaving in ideas of critical fabulation from Saidiya Hartman, a scholar at Columbia whose work I've encountered again and again in my Literary Studies classes back home. It was surreal to see theory I've only ever discussed in a seminar room translated into a physical, curated space.

On the social side, my friends came to visit me in London this week, and for once I got to play tour guide instead of tourist, which felt like a small but meaningful milestone. I've noticed lately that I no longer pull up Google Maps for my morning commute, the barista at Miel already knows my coffee order before I say it, and I've even caught myself making idle small talk about the weather, which might be the most convincing evidence yet that London is starting to feel like home. By the end of the week, Diya packed up and headed back to the US, and I found myself an "empty nester" for the first time this summer, quiet flat and all, but glad to know she made it home just in time to celebrate the Fourth of July with her family. All in all, this was a fabulous week.