Enmodes Week

Week 13—April 9^thWeek – Enmodes week

Monday

Today is the beginning of what I’ve deemed as “enmodes week”. Friday is our final presentation to enmodes in Aachen, so most of our week is dedicated to finishing and perfecting our project. We started at 8:45 this morning, Corey and I working on the DHL, Camella and Darby working on the solid works, and the others working on our slides and presentation. Its slow work, and a little difficult because we aren’t quite qualified to solve this kind of problem, but I enjoy the challenge. The rest of the day consisted of History of Medicine, in which we learned about American health care (and just how expensive and messed up it is), and then lunch and 253. 

Tuesday

Tuesday began bright and early with another enmodes meeting. We then had a long break and then more enmodes in the afternoon. At this point we were feeling pretty good about our project, and had most of everything done. Darby and Camella were  finishing up the solid works, and we worked on more DHF stuff and perfecting the slides. 

Wednesday 

All of today was dedicated to enmodes—we had no breaks or other classes. We spent the morning finishing the slides, and then practice our run through for the presentation. That afternoon we presented to Dr. Wasser, Romi and Alexa. What I thought was going to be a very smooth presentation ended up taking an hour and half to get through. Our idea is difficult to explain, and our order of slides was a little confusing, so there were quite a few questions. It was a tiring and stressful hour, especially because we ended up right back where we were when we started. But we knew our idea very thoroughly after that. Afterwards, we went back to work fixing our slides and presentation speeches. 

Thursday went much the same—we would practice, present, perfect.

Friday

Enmodes day!! I think at this point everyone was so ready to present. We met bright and early at the Hofgarten bus stop. It was so cute to see everyone dressed up for the presentation. Most people passed out on the bus because of the rather late nights we had had the nights before. What seemed like seconds later we were unloading at the hotel, and sitting down in the conference room. Dr. Wasser came up and introduced the teams, starting with this week’s theme song—the ninja turtles movie theme song. Before I knew it, team Donatello was called up, and we presented. It was pretty cool to hear the other teams’ solution ideas. Everyone presented so well. Afterwards, we were all called up to the front and the enmodes team asked us questions.

Looking back now, enmodes week is one of my favorite weeks of the trip. In between all the stress, and all the work, we really got to know one another. Because all 26 or 27 of us were in the AIB for hours on end, all working hard, all a little sleep deprived, we bonded quite a lot that week. A ping pong table sort of appeared in the AIB out of nowhere, so most of our freetime was spent playing ping pong. We started playing around the world, which was super fun because everyone could play.