Josef Vácha

If I look into my past through the lens of introspection, I find that I had a certain affection for Physics and Philosophy - a course I am planning to study at the University of Oxford thanks to the generous support of The Bakala Foundation - probably since childhood, when I started my so far unconcluded struggle with question such as: Is it possible to know, whether consciousness is continuous? or What mechanism connects our subjective perception of time to its objective counterpart and is there even such a thing? However it was much later at Johannes Kepler Grammar School - a highschool where I was fortunate enough to study - when I discovered the relation of these questions to the fields of Physics and Philosophy. During my studies here I participated in countless competitions and correspondence seminars in various subjects including Physics olympiad in which I will be competing this year even at the international level. Thanks to my high school I also got the opportunity to study for the length of one trimester at the prestigious boarding school Winchester College in the UK. This encounter with the British education system and its advantages not only pushed me far forward in the chosen subjects but above all initiated my interest in the possibility of further study abroad and motivated me to pursue it. In Physics I am mainly interested in Astrophysics, which I was able to get to know up close through multiple internships at various institutes of the Czech Academy of Sciences, and most of my spare time I usually spend with scouting, futile efforts to keep in touch with various branches of human knowledge, amateur astronomy, programming or watching obscure cinematography from the 60’s and 70’s.