Hell week is upon us… and it was exactly like, yet nothing like, what I expected.
The week started out with classes on Monday. We had physiology
and our last history of medicine lecture. Then, we had our lab final… which was…
something… After the test, our focus shifted to Enmodes, and it stayed there until
Friday afternoon. We spent a few hours on Monday afternoon working to finalize
our design and make progress on the DHF.
On Tuesday, we got started around 9:30am, and went full force
on figuring out what the heck we were doing. Pat, Milo, and I started working
on the presentation and continued the DHF, while Elizabeth worked on Solidworks
and Amy did calculations. It was a busy day, but we headed home around 6 or 7pm.
On Wednesday morning, we were greeted with news from Amy that
our design didn’t work. Based on her calculations, the length of wire we chose,
when heated to 40 degrees Celsius, would only raise the blood temperature by less
than half a degree. And since the point of the project is to raise the blood
temperature back to normal core body temperature (which is an increase of about
3-4 degrees), this was bad. So, Amy and Elizabeth spent the next 5-6 hours
reworking calculations and running Solidworks flow simulations with the help of
Dr. Carrell and Scott. We finally got everything figured out and could put
final figures into our presentation. It was a beautiful and sunny day, so we
spent about an hour and a half outside. We gave our practice presentation around
5pm, and then got pizza courtesy of Dr. Wasser. After dinner, we spent the next
few hours editing our figures and presentation slides to make them better. It
was around 10:15pm when I finally left to go home.
On Thursday, we continued working on our presentation. We
had another practice presentation around 3pm, and then made final changes to
our figures and slides before our last practice presentation at 7pm.
Thankfully, we didn’t have many cosmetic changes to make after that, so we got
our final PowerPoint turned in at 8pm, and then we went home to get sleep
before the big presentation!
On Friday, we met at Hofgarten at 7:45am. I got up early to
grab Theo’s beforehand, of course. On the drive to Aachen, Elizabeth and I
practiced what we were going to say for our parts of the presentation. At
Enmodes, the conference room where we were presenting wasn’t big enough for all
of us, so Dr. Borchardt took us on a tour of the clean room, lab, and other
facilities on the property. Unfortunately, the tour took as long as both other
groups’ presentations, so we didn’t get to see their final designs. But it was
also nice to not have time to think about the presentation beforehand, since we
presented basically the minute we got back to the conference room. Our presentation
went really well, and Austen especially liked the single-use nature of our
design. Afterwards, we got lunch and printen and then headed back to Bonn. I
spent the rest of the night relaxing.
Saturday was Charity Day. I went to ZeSaBo and helped
organize summer and winter jackets by gender and size. I really enjoyed the
opportunity to give back to the Bonn community, but I would have preferred it to
have been on a different weekend just because we were so busy. The rest of the
weekend consisted of finishing the DHF and studying for the physiology tests.
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