On Wednesday, they met the king

 

It's no exaggeration to say UAA student Kjersti Andreassen had to leave her homeland to meet its king. She's Norwegian, and he's...well...he's His Majesty King Harald V, age 78, the king of her country.

They met Wednesday in the atrium of a UAA science building when leaders from a Norwegian university and UAA formalized their joint pursuit of relevant northern research and creative activity before an audience that included King Harald and about 200 others.

By design, Andreassen had a spot in the crowd. Before the king arrived, he let it be known that in addition to witnessing all the academic formalities, he wished to spend a few minutes with real UAA students. Schedulers planned seven minutes, exactly. When foreign dignitaries visit, agendas get detailed.

To accommodate his wish, UAA organizers invited Andreassen to chat with her king. She's studying journalism at UAA and working as the photo editor of The Northern Light. A while back, she happened to marry an Alaskan she met in Hawaii, so here she is in college.

She didn't have to go it alone. Jessica Faust and Amy Kirkham, both UAA graduate students, joined her.

Faust is researching Alaska bats in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, a project launched by a UAA biology professor. Alaska scientists got interested after bat populations in the Lower 48 plummeted dramatically. Among their questions: Are Alaska bats so doomed?

While she prepped for summer fieldwork near Cordova and Kenai, Faust read all the research on bats she could find. Turns out Norwegian researchers are studying and publishing on bats, too, and using many of the same techniques as the Alaskans. They responded warmly to her email outreach.

Now Faust, who actually lived in Norway as a child as part of her father's oil industry career, is excited about further connecting with the Norwegians and sharing her master's thesis findings.

Kirkham is studying hormone levels and energy stores in reproductive seals for her master's work with another UAA professor. The Weddell seals they study are in Antarctica; fieldwork there has taken her south three times.

So what's her connection to Norway? Kirkham just returned from a month at the University Centre in Svalbard in far northern Norway. She studied with a leading expert on biotelemetry-all the ways science can successfully monitor animals in the wild, from simple tagging to sophisticated transmitters. The technology is evolving rapidly, Kirkham said, and she'll use what she learned in Svalbard on her own research.

On Wednesday, after four UAA professors briefly described projects with Norwegian colleagues- ranging from fisheries biology to winter tourism and community public health challenges-and once leaders from each university had signed their joint agreement, the crowd moved on to afternoon snacks.

The king, however, moved on to the three UAA students, all of them standing at a table just big enough for the quartet.

So what was that like? Did he grill them on their research?

Not at all, the three students said. "He asked what it was like to be in Anchorage and to be at the UAA campus," Andreaasen said.

"He just chatted with us," said Faust. "It was casual, not intense at all."

"He seemed interested in us on a personal level," Kirkham said, "not a symbolic one."

The king  even told a joke (about them having to be in school in summer), which got them laughing and forgetting their seven-minute deadline. They talked for 20 minutes.

Later, the students said they were excited by the academic dimensions developing between UAA and Norway's Arctic University. Their rector, the equivalent of UAA's chancellor, stopped by their table to say she and her Alaska counterparts would hammer out next steps. They would recognize the many existing collaborations, she said, but also identify new ones of mutual interest; everything from business to fine arts to indigenous culture was on the table.

"Alaska and Norway have a lot to learn from one another," Andreassen said. "Anchorage is much more diverse than Norway, which has been a very educational experience for me."\

Though both are oil states, Andreassen said Norway is moving toward a knowledge economy. "A bachelor's degree in Norway is more equivalent to a high school diploma here; people are expected to go on for a master's and even a Ph.D. The saturation of knowledge is much higher there, in general."

For all the cerebral headiness of the day, Andreassen said she was pleased to finally meet her king. It had almost happened once before, in Norway.

"I had heard he was giving the graduation speech at my former university," she said. "I was like, 'Dang, I could have met the king!'" Then a month later, she read that he was making his inaugural visit to Alaska.

Friends and family back home are envious, she said. "My mother's been spamming me on Facebook for two weeks, now: Have you met the king yet? Have you met the king yet?"

Finally. she did.

rsion of this story by Kathleen McCoy appeared Sunday, May 31, 2015 in the Alaska Dispatch News.