Aachen (AIB)

On Monday with AIB we had our Berlin pre-departure meeting, which got me really excited for the trip. We got visitor books so we could start planning what we wanted to do in our free time. On Tuesday we worked on creating a visual representation for our socket design. Our model didn’t work out too well but it helped us organize our ideas as a group and make sure we were all on the same page about what we wanted the design to look like. We also had our second Signals and Systems test this week. The material wasn’t too difficult but it was over a lot of information and a long time so it was hard.

On Thursday we went to Aachen to visit the Department of Cardiovascular Engineering. This was one of my favorite trips out of the whole semester. We began the visit with a presentation about the different devices they work on and how they do testing. They explained artificial lungs, artificial heart valves, and artificial hearts. I really enjoyed this presentation because we had just learned about the cardiovascular system in Physiology so we could actually understand what they were talking about, and Dr. Wasser occasionally stopped the speaker to ask us questions and make sure we understood. The speaker explained the different methods and instruments they use for research and for testing, and then we got to take a tour of the labs and actually see everything we had just learned about. This was really interesting! The people working in each lab would explain to us what they were doing and we already had some understanding from the presentation. This tour made me really excited because it confirmed my decision to be a biomedical engineer. Seeing the work they were doing made me realize that it was exactly what I want to do, and being there I felt like it’s where I belong.

After the tour we went to the center of the city for lunch. I got some really delicious authentic Chinese food at a cute Asian restaurant. Next we got to take a tour of the cathedral. We started in the treasury, which had some really beautiful stuff with interesting background stories. I especially liked the tomb we saw because it had the story of Persephone shown on it, which is one of my favorite stories from mythology. Then we got to see the inside of the cathedral itself. It was breathtaking. The ceiling and walls were beautiful tile mosaics and the architecture inside was really cool. It was laid out in an octagon and it was just so interesting and hard to describe. After the tour we had a little more free time to explore the city. We went in the chocolate shops (Aachen in on the border with Belgium, which means they have amazing chocolate) and looked at some Roman ruins and took pictures under flowering trees. It was probably one of the best days of the whole trip!