First, let’s start out with what this is/why I’m writing this. I am in Berlin, Germany for 8 weeks (May 17, 2010 until July 12, 2010) for a research internship. The internship is at the Berlin Institute of Technology (Technische Universität Berlin, or TU-Berlin, often I’ll just say TU), and it is through the RISE program – Research Internships in Science and Engineering, which is a program through the DAAD – Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst (German academic exchange service).
So, on Saturday May 15, I left for Berlin. Leaving was damn hard, and I’d be lying if I wasn’t tempted to just leave the airport right there and stay home. But this is something I needed to do if I want to get good resume experience, and hopefully 8 weeks will go semi-fast. It does at school. And at home. Well normally time flies doesn’t it? The 8 hour flight over wasn’t great we’ll say that, THAT time didn’t fly. I had a middle seat in a section of 4 seats. Whenever I did sleep it wasn’t good and my back was so freaking sore. The cool thing was that each seat had personal TVs that you could tune to whatever you wanted, as opposed to the stereotypical in-flight movie (As you might recall, I had to watch 27 Dresses on my last flight home from Germany). I was able to watch two episodes of the Simpsons that they had, one episode of Entourage, and one episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which was pretty cool. I got to Munich no problem, made it through customs no problem. I had to stop by a Lufthansa center to get my ticket and then I made it to my gate with plenty of time. I had to buy some internet and I shot off a quick email to mom and dad to let them know I was in Germany. The flight to Berlin was awesome, at least compared to the other one, because it was only 45 minutes. As we were waiting to get off after landing the guy behind me saw my Pitt shirt. Turns out he was from Jeannette and we talked about how Terrelle Pryor was dead to both of us. Then my luggage came thank god. I have spent 2 weeks in Europe before with no luggage, so I wasn’t exactly looking forward to 8 weeks.
I was able to grab a cab to my apartment, which was a nice Mercedes. He drove like a taxi driver we’ll leave it at that. I put in the code to the lockbox that the landlord gave me and thank god the key was there. I opened the door and quickly moved my stuff in. The room is nice, it has a twin bed, large desk, armoire, and nightstand, plus a wall fixture of 6 cubes to put extra stuff. The building houses international students, and each “room” is a hallway with four bedrooms, and in the hallway is a kitchenette and bathroom. The first night I met Nadia, a student from Portugal, who has the bedroom next to mine. She was very nice, but I only talked to her for a minute so I don’t really know what she is doing here yet…well actually almost done, she told me she leaves in 2 weeks. There are four sets of these four rooms per floor, and 5 floors, for a total of 80 rooms.
The very next day I was thrust into action in the large city of Berlin. I couldn’t take the jetlag so I had fallen asleep mad early Sunday, like 4 pm their time for a 2 or 3 hour nap. That night I went to bed around 11 pm, but woke up on the dot of 3 am. I laid awake for 2 hours, tossing and turning, with John Mayer and Taylor Swift stuck in my head. Around 5 am I finally fell asleep again as the sun was rising, and slept through my 8 am alarm, because I forget to turn the iPod volume up. Luckily I snapped awake at 8:40 am, got in the shower real quick, and started to make my way to the university. I took the subway to Alexanderplatz, which is a crazy busy station at the city center, and got a rail to the university, with the whole trip taking maybe 20 minutes. I met Steffen, my PhD student, and he really immersed me in German. He showed me the pilot plant he works with and the Aspen control system, and gave me some (English) literature to read. From the sounds of things I’ll be working with a French student named Matthias a lot (who wasn’t there) to vary set factors about the pilot plant to try and reduce the amount of CO2 in the waste stream. …I think. I’ll get back at that when I know more for sure. Steffen helped me buy a rail pass and a meal card, and I got out early around 2:30 or 3 pm. He could tell jetlag was killing me.
Monday evening, feeling brave enough to conquer more of the Subway and Rail system, I made my way about 2 miles away to the main building of the people who own this building (and I guess a bunch more around town?) to buy some internet. So this was Monday, and they told me it would take 2 or 3 days at the latest for them to put the network ID and password in my mailbox (spätestens Donnerstag, said the main…oh yeah I did it all in German, I’ve really been trying to limit the English. Except with some stuff in the plant – I made the guy give me the safety instructions and tour in English. I feel like that is important enough for me to understand 100%...). Let’s see how long it ACTUALLY takes, here we go German punctuality. I got back and walked around my street a little bit, turns out there are like 4 grocery stores within a block or two, it was slightly ridiculous. When I got back to the apartment, I met my other roommate, Christoph. I say other because from what he told me, the 4th room is currently empty. Christoph is 24 and from southwestern Poland, and after a minute of talking with him in German, I was delighted to hear, “My German is not so good, I actually prefer English.” Well say hello to Mr. English. We talked for about an hour, with Nadia joining in about halfway through. Christoph is halfway done a 6 month IT internship, not sure who with though. Later that night I met some other people in the building – Ashish, a 24 year old PhD molecular medicine student from India, and Robert, 23, studying hotel management and doing an internship at Hilton Hotels, from Holland but actually born in Westchester, NY.
Monday night I actually slept through the whole night but I snoozed my alarm a few times, had some weird dreams, and ended up waking up at 9:40 am to get all the way to the University by 10:00 am. Miraculously I made it by 10:05…not too bad. I learned more about the project. Steffen has a pilot plant with an adsorption and desorption column. After the reaction to produce ethylene, there is a waste stream that is about 22 weight percent CO2, so that is trying to be reduced to 1%. So over the course of the next 8 weeks we will be systemically varying parameters to see if we can match the theoretical results, which were promising. It is all controlled from the “Control room” which I will show pictures of. This was described in a 5 page technical paper in grammatically terrible English. I asked Steffen if it was going to be published, he said yes, I hid my shock, offered to edit the English, and he gladly accepted.
So here are the people that I encounter in the lab on a daily basis. Obviously Steffen, who is German. His English is probably what my German is like. It isn’t grammatically right all the time but he gets his point across. Andreas is from Spain but speaks German and I think pretty decent English, though I only really heard him speak it once. He helps Steffen out. Matthias was there today and he seems to have his own project with Steffen involving the columns. He is French, speaks very good German, and pretty poor English. Olvü is from Istanbul, Turkey, and is a Master’s student who has been in Germany about a year. Her German is great and her English is not so good either. Oliver (Oli) is a cool guy, he’s a 40ish year old chemist. He speaks English the best and converses with me in English, and I try to reply back in German, so we both are improving our second languages. A good example was him trying to explain “Niederschlag,” not knowing what the English translation was, and I figured it out to be precipitate. He and I both described our German/English the same way – We both know how to get around in the streets but when it comes to translating something like hydrochloric acid or sodium hydroxide, we have a much harder time. Oli and I talked about music a lot today, he plays guitar and bass and sequences drums. Which reminds me that I really need to find out how to get a guitar. So with the exception of Oli, the group’s collective English skills aren’t too good, so the main operating language is German. I just told them to speak slower to me and it’s been working fine. The best part is I am working on the thing I never ever got to work on in school, speaking. In German class you might speak for a sentence when you raise your hand and answer a question, but here, all I do is speak. It helps not only my speaking, but also my confidence with the language. Since the word order is so different in German, speaking it really reinforces the language in me.
So I worked with Steffen the first part of the day. He and I troubleshot a problem with the column, because gas was escaping when a valve opened that shouldn’t have been. Turns out an open/close valve like 30 feet high was stuck open and it needed to be closed. Check out the pictures of the column it is mad interesting. After lunch I worked with Oli and Olvü to take samples from the column to titrate them and figure out CO2 levels in the column at different points. Oh yeah, about Oli – he looks damn near identical to Till Lindemann, the vocalist for Rammstein. This fact is of course made funnier by the fact that he plays a lot of music. This fact is FURTHER made funnier by the fact that he is the 3rd person I’ve seen who resembles Till. I am keeping a Till Count at the end of each entry…I would keep a Euro Mullet count but that’s already in the 4 figures. Speaking of other things that I noticed that annoy me – 1) The Germans love Chucks. I happen to strongly dislike them. Problem. 2) As opposed to any place that makes sense in this world where one side of the street is odd and the other is even, the numbers here increase on one side, reach a stopping point at the end of the street, and decrease on the other side. So for example I am at 119 but across the street is like, 40something. Thus, the problem when I started to walk up my street to get to Brunnenstraße 4, when it is actually the other direction since they are decreasing on the other side while my side is increasing.
Wednesday I woke up at 9:55 to be in the lab by 10 am. I wouldn’t have cared so much, except for the fact that the dream I was having when I snapped awake was me being my mom, dad, sister, and Bandit, that would could have gone on a little longer. So I got to the lab about 1030, said that jetlag was killing me (whether it was or not isn’t really important, but it’s what I told him), explained that my body still thought I was trying to wake it up at 2 in the morning, and promised that it wouldn’t happen again. No big deal, I just have to make really sure that I don’t pull that shit again tomorrow. Today I just took samples from the columns all day and titrated them, and when I say titrated them, I really mean sat at a computer that my mom circa 1998 would have thought was old and watched as the samples were precision titrated by a machine. I already kind of knew I didn’t want to do research (aka grad school) but things like today reinforced that position. I bullshitted a lot with Oli, he is quickly becoming the coolest member of the lab to me. He gave me a possible invention idea which I am obviously not going to tell you people. He is learning a lot of English from me and likewise I’m learning a lot of German from him and the lab. Though I don’t know how much “titrieren” – to titrate – will help me in the streets. Well, yes I do. None. Got out of the lab late, like 7 pm, but I wasn’t complaining since I more or less didn’t start till 1030/11. Yesterday everyone was saying “Feierabend” when they left at 430/5, which to me translates to “evening of vacation.” Maybe them staying today until 7 (and I was the second person to leave, Matthias and Steffen stayed after I left) makes me understand why they were so happy yesterday.
Thursday I ran from the Tiergarten stop where I get off to the university and made it by 10:01, but Steffen wasn’t even there he was in some meeting. So I titrated basically all day. Mostly by myself, but I talked with Martin a while was we were both working in the same lab. He is experimenting with UV light scatters. Oli wasn’t even there today, he took a sick day, so I couldn’t give him the gifts I got him … well I use that term loosely. I brought it my external hard drive to show him pictures of the guitar I built, because he was really interested in seeing pictures when I told him about it. I made a sign that says “221B Baker Street,” the home of Sherlock Holmes, because he said he always felt like he needed a sign like that because people make him figure stuff out without telling him. Maybe tomorrow. I got back around 7:30 or 8 and my internet code was there (barely made the 3 day limit Germans…), though right now it’s pretty finicky. Apparently Christoph (which I found out is actually spelled something like Kryzstof…or something… I will stick to Christoph) says that some days it’s great and some days not so much. I’m really hoping with the weekend coming up tomorrow I can get out and actually see some of this city…there look to be so many interesting places when I ride the rail, but I obviously can’t go there just yet.
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