Day 1

Monday. 6:30 AM. Time for day 1 of work. After a tasty breakfast of rolls, jam, wurst (German lunch meat), and cheese, the standard breakfast in the house. Ossi and I got on our bikes and took the long way through the woods to the train station. Though Ossi has a monthly pass for the train, I had to buy my ticket. There are machines on the train that sell tickets. On the machines they suggest you use exact change. Of course for my 3.60 train ticket I only had a 5 and so i put it in the machine and not only did it give me my ticket but I hit the jackpot. It just rained coins into the dispenser slot for 15 or twenty minutes. When I took them all out and counted I found that it had given me my 1.40 change in 10 cent pieces. After a short trip we arrived at the campus and the day began. First we had a group meeting during which general announcements for the group are made and a couple of the PhD Students present where they are in their research. The first of these presentations was done by a man named DingDing. Here is what I can tell you about the presentation: HydrogelscaptureandreleasevitaminD3. Now this may sound very complicated, I think it was as it lasted for 76 slides, but the combination of the technical language, the accent, my complete lack of chemistry knowledge and a hint of jetlag had me completely boggled and nodding off within the first half hour of my first day at work. A great way to start. (I came to find out later that even the other chemistry PhD students were bored to tears by it.) The next presentation by Nico was much more interesting and straightforward involving creating flaps that could be controlled to mix very small amounts of substances on a chip on the nanometer scale. At the end of the meeting Ossi introduced me to Pandi, the PhD student who I was assisting. Ossi left shortly thereafter to go to a meeting and when I looked around Pandi was nowhere to be found. Luckily by following others I was able to track him down. The rest of the day was somewhat of a whirlwind. Not only was there a lot that I was told and shown, but combining my lack of chemistry knowledge, and the speed and accent that Pandi speaks at I was struggling. I was given a tour of the different labs in the department and shown all of the very expensive equipment that I could only imagine the uses for. Pandi then told me about our project. We were coating tubes with a polymer that would hopefully prevent thrombolytics by sticking to the tubing and repelling cells that normally get stuck and cause blockages. The current problem with this coating was the actual coating process. We needed a way to prevent air bubbles from forming to ensure an even and thorough coating.

At the end of the day, Ossi and I took the train home (I actually received a 1 Euro coin in change this time), had dinner and I promptly fell asleep after a long and stressful first day.