Monday- Waking up at 4:30 in the morning was not my bag of tea (more importantly, not my cup of coffee. As in I didn't get any coffee until the bus took a rest stop around 11. Headaches, let me tell you. Yes, I am an addict. No, it is not a problem. On another note, I'm not entirely sure "not my bag of tea" is actually a real expression. Okay, just looked it up. A real, if somewhat obscure expression. It stays!) For all of that, I slept about half the time, and it wasn't really a bad trip. We arrived around 2, checked into our hotel and immediately departed for the city tour. Everyone else hopped onto some fun looking bikes, and I hopped onto a fun looking bus. Ah, the joys of being injured. A good tour was had all around, though I was a bit disappointed to find out that I had missed the German Parliament (no, not even going to try to spell the German name properly.) After all of this we had a lovely group dinner and I discovered the deliciousness that is seasonal beer. Yum!
Tuesday- Today was all about the medical school. Medical school founder, medical school medical history museum, medical school students, and medical school skills lab! It was great fun, and the medical history museum was one of the best put together museums I've ever been to. The medical skills lab is a great idea, and was fun to attend, but unfortunately I'm not sure we got as much as we could have out of it, given the particular skills that were being demonstrated all required some background knowledge to know what you were doing. I think if it were more purely mechanical skills, we could have learned it and gotten more from the experience. After that we had Group Dinner Berlin 2.0 at an awesome Moroccan place. Yum. After dinner I had to help finish up our Otto Bock slides, which unfortunately prevented me from going to Joanna's birthday extravaganza, but I got more sleep for it, so we'll call it a wash.
Wednesday- We toured a concentration camp. I always have a difficult time finding the right words to describe experiences like that. Fun? No. Interesting? In a way. Important? Yes, but in the right context. In high school, I took a semester long course called "Facing History and Ourselves—Human Nature and the Holocaust." It was a class intended primarily to put the atrocities of the Third Reich in context. We spent more time focusing on all the social, cultural, philosophical, economic, and scientific contexts which contributed to and allowed the Holocaust to occur. As the title of the class implied, an important lesson (perhaps the important lesson) to learn from the class was not what other people in the past were capable of, but what humanity in general was capable of. More personally, what you and the people around you might be capable of. You can't perhaps go to Germany without visiting a concentration camp, but you also can't visit Germany without acknowledging that they have perhaps done a better job of remembering their past crimes. Something the United States could perhaps learn a thing or two from.
The only pictures I took in Berlin were here (I've only got a fairly bad cell phone camera, unfortunately,) and there is really only one worth adding to the blog. More famous,and probably more cruel, at Auschwitz, but chilling nonetheless, "Arbeit Mact Frei" (work will make you free) is written on the entrance to the camp where around 50,000 people were killed.
After we got back, we had some free time. Shannon, Erin, Melissa and I went to the international gardens, which was absolutely gorgeous. The sections were divided up based on the location it was modeled after. Everything was in bloom, and it was super peaceful. I can honestly say that if I lived in the area, I would have no problem paying for a season pass to that place. We even had tea at a Chinese tea house inside the Chinese section of the garden. It was great. After that we had Otto Bock practice, which was choppy but productive.
Thursday- We went to the Jewish History Museum in Berlin. Very interesting architecture, but I'm not sure it really had the affect on me that was intended. I was more just interested than particularly emotional about it, to be honest. The museum seemed very well laid out and run, and it was unfortunate that our tour seemed quite rushed and not altogether cohesive. Nonetheless, I learned quite a bit and enjoyed my time there.
Afterwards, I had a quick lunch with Robert, Tessa, and Austin and walked to the Berlin Hauptbahnhoff. With about an hour to kill, we ordered drinks from a place by the river. I had a virgin cocktail called "Safer Sex on The Beach" almost purely so that I could say I had had it. It was tasty. We caught the bus and headed to our accommodations for the night. After a brief detour and an appeasing Chinese buffet, we ended up in a hotel about 30 minutes farther out than the original intention, but with a better conference room. We had our final Otto Bock run through, and went to bed feeling moderately prepared for the next day.
Friday- Otto Bock. The day and presentation everyone had been working towards all semester. But first we got to look around and talk to people! And boy was it cool. I'm prone towards not concerning myself too much with some of the more mind bending aspects of engineering (*cough* signals and systems, *cough*) because ultimately it isn't what I'm planning on doing for the rest of my life, but wow. Otto Bock was impressive enough to make me seriously reconsider what is at this point almost a decade long goal. And it wasn't just their swanky break room. Prosthetics was one of the bio-medical engineering fields which really drew me towards the major in the first place. It is both fascinating and important work that has the ability to really help people quite quickly. We are reaching for the point where prosthetic devices will be equally as good, or potentially better than, our natural bodies, and it isn't that far away. Beyond how completely jaw-dropping amazing that thought is, it comes with its own bag of worms and interesting philosophical questions.
Now for the presentation itself. Somehow, we all reached deep down inside of ourselves and made some legitimately good ideas also seem professional and feasible (with a few tweaks of course, but to quote the Otto Bock engineers "This is detail work!) Everyone absolutely rocked their presentations, fielded questions like champs, and it was a giddy experience. I, of course, have to pay particular praise to my group, (team one represent!) as everyone did a fantastic job and I really enjoyed working with them.
And that, as they say, is that.
No comments:
Post a Comment