Time is Precious in More Ways than One - Week 14

Bonn, Germany

April 17th - 23rd

Nothing new and exciting to report this week other than being held against my will at school for what felt like 48 hours straight but was actually only for 16 hours two days in a row. Still, my sleep schedule is so messed up because of this. I ended up not getting home till 11:30 one evening and 1:00 the other. All of this pain was for a good cause though. Our professors were having us practice and perfect presentations were going to give to a company on Thursday. All semester long we h
ave been working on a device design project that a company has assigned to us. They were having some problems with their device and we were tasked to come up with a clever way to solve it. All of this was medical of course, hence the biomedical study abroad I'm on. The final product was beautiful! The copious amounts of stress I had to endure to get to the final product was all worth it.

All classes that could be canceled were canceled on Tuesday and Wednesday so that we could do nothing but finish the last little parts of our presentations while simultaneously presenting to our professors over and over again to gain much needed criticism. I learned during this experience that procrastination will come back to bite you in the butt. In retrospect, if my group was more proactive, we would have been able to work on the presentation aspect for those two days instead of the content of our presentations. None the less, we ended up finishing everything on time. I also learned with this experience that I really don't thermodynamics. The equations are complicated and the concepts are beyond my second semester sophomore education. I ended up spending two days with this horrid math to finally get an answer literally 2 hours before we gave our last presentation for the night on Wednesday at 10 pm. Talk about cutting it close.

Aachen (Presentation Day)

April 20th

Presentation day started with being at the bus stop by 7:20 and having had taken a shower that morning at 1:15 am since I didn't get home till 1:00 in the morning, I was exhausted. Let's say that all of the stress and sleep deprivation slammed into me whenever we finished our time at Aachen and I ended up knocking out on the bus on the way home. All of presentations went incredibly well. I'm so proud of all of us. Everyone put in so much hard work and effort and it really paid off. The company seemed to like all of our ideas. This was my first device design experience and my first taste of what a biomedical engineer actually does. I enjoyed it thoroughly but wish there could have been less thermodynamics involved. To reward myself for such hard work, I bought some Printin while in Aachen. This is a soft gingerbread stick smothered in chocolate. Not too sweet and great for when I do have sweet tooth or just need a midnight snack!

The trip is fastly coming to a close and I can't believe our device design project is over. It feels like yesterday we were going to Aachen the first time to meet with the company to discuss the project and from there were broken off into teams to start brainstorming. There's less than two weeks and my study abroad experience will officially be over even though I won't be leaving Europe for another 3 and half weeks. I'm sad to see it ending. I'm going to miss Bonn and my host family. I don't know how I would have gotten through this semester abroad without my amazing host family. I was extremely lucky to be paired with them. They are such sweet people that I enjoy being around and will deeply miss their company. Hopefully we can stay in touch in the future. Germany has been good to me thus far. All that is left in my journey is to slay my finals and complete all of my projects.