My name is Svala Sverrisdóttir and I will be starting as a first-year PhD student at UC Berkeley in the fall. My current mathematical interests lie in the realms of combinatorics and algebraic geometry and even though my PhD research topic is not yet decided I am hoping my work will lie at the interface of these two areas. This summer, I am visiting the nonlinear algebra group at the MPI and working on a project about nilpotent 7-dimensional Lie algebras.