Horses!

So, when I first arrived at Clausthal I was given a quick introduction to the town and the institute and then sent off to unpack and settle in.  Once I had emptied my suitcases and made my bed with the borrowed linens, I sat down and started thinking of all the questions I had about this new place where I would be for the next two months.  I wanted to find activities that lined up with my interests and would keep me from long, lonely afternoons in front of my computer wishing for home, although I certainly would have had enough projects with this blog and the scrapbook I'm trying to put together to keep me occupied, had I really wanted to work on them.  So I started in on that first Monday with a long list of questions for Leif, who graciously sat down with me (after having made the rounds and "met" all of the coworkers) in order to tackle them one by one.

One of my questions was whether there were opportunities in Clausthal for me to ride horses.  I was imagining perhaps a small stable where they'd be happy to have someone with a decent knowledge of horses come and help out by mucking stalls/distributing hay a couple of times a week, and in return would graciously let me ride every once in a while. After all, that's what happens in all of the little-girl novels, right?  She just stumbles upon a stable where she can work in exchange for riding?  Well, such is not usually the case in the real world, but when I posed the question to Leif he assured me that there were several stables in the area, so riding was a distinct possibility.  When, the following afternoon, I asked for more specifics concerning the horses, he exclaimed (in typical Leif style), "Yes, I've thought of exactly whom you need to meet!" and picked up his phone.  Two minutes later I was sitting in the office of a mechanical engineering graduate student at the institute of Welding and Cutting, right across the parking lot from PuK.  She was a wonderfully cheerful and friendly individual and started telling me all about her horse that she kept at a local stables - a young, fiery chestnut Quarter Horse mare whom she had ended up buying because of the previous owner's inability to sell a horse in the sudden economic downturn.  My heart leapt - my favorite horse at Living Waters, the one I've been training and spoiling for several summers now, is a young, fiery chestnut Quarter Horse mare.  It was a match made in Heaven!!  Additionally, Mirjam (the graduate student) told me that she was the only one at her stables to ride Western - all of the other boarders preferred English and a more dressage approach.  I don't like English, because I find it snobby, stiff, and impossible to wear jeans while riding (the stirrup leathers chafe against the inside seam of your jeans due to the unavoidable movement of your legs as you ride).  So to hear that this lovely new friend not only rode a horse that sounded just like mine but rode her Western made me grin from ear to ear.  We chatted for a few minutes, Mirjam also telling me about a dedicated Quarter Horse breeding barn in the area which specialized in the breed and also rode Western (apparently she didn't keep her mare there because of the cost or because she already knew the people at the barn where she boarded her) and sending a quick email to a friend of hers who rode there.  Then she said abruptly, "Well, do you want to come with me today?  I'm headed there right after work."  Head still spinning from the swift turn of events, I gladly agreed.

 A short 30 minutes later I found myself in the passenger seat of her little Fiat hatchback which had a bumper sticker on the back that read "Pleasure" and pictured the silhouette of a cowboy on a fine Western horse, as well as horse magazines and a halter or two scattered about the dashboard, floor, and backseat.  She was obviously a horse person, and an animal lover in general, as I soon found out.  On the way to the stable we stopped at a veterinary clinic to check on a stray mother cat and her newborn kittens which Mirjam had found just the week before on the side of the road and had brought them here, concerned about their survival.  Her consternation was apparent when she found out that only one of the kittens had survived, and she sighed more than once, "I wish I could just take them all home, but my current pets wouldn't like that very much."  Satisfied as to the condition of the mother cat and the remaining kitten, we continued on our way and soon arrived at the stable.  Mirjam popped inside of one of the stalls and soon reemerged leading a beautiful mare who could have been the spitting image of my Tango.  We quickly began to groom her and I tried to talk about horses in German, but found my vocabulary seriously lacking and soon switched to English, which Mirjam fortunately knew about as well as I knew German.  Together we brushed mini-Tango (as I dubbed her in my head, never actually catching her real name from Mirjam) until she shone, which wasn't hard with her healthy and naturally lustrous coat.  Then Mirjam explained that her horse tended to have back problems, which she eased by massaging her muscles before working her.  This brought a smile to my lips as I recalled Babe, the bad-tempered Appaloosa mare up at Living Waters whom we had acquired as one of the sole survivors of a bad barn fire.  We had eventually discovered that cramping flank muscles were also the cause of much of her crankiness and now made much ado about massaging her butt with special ointment, which was the only thing that would render her docile.  After massaging mini-Tango, Mirjam went off to fetch a friend of hers who would do the actual working of the horse.  Turns out that Mirjam is a relatively inexperienced rider herself and has done much of her learning along with the horse, which is never the ideal course of action and can lead to some serious quirks in both horse and rider if not supervised by more experienced trainers.  It turned out that this particular day was not one on which Mirjam would ride, but her friend put the horse on a lunge line and soon had her trotting around in circles, though reluctantly.  Seeing her cut capers and vehemently protest the exercise, Mirjam laughed and said, "See? She is so lazy sometimes.  She does not want to work today."  After watching the trainer's progress for awhile in motivating the lazy horse, Mirjam offered to take me on a tour of the grounds, which I gladly accepted.  The barn was relatively small and quite full - some horses were two to a stall and one corner had been clumsily blocked off with gates to make room for another pony.  It had originally been a barn for both horses and cattle, and there were only about eight horse stalls - the other dozen being where the cows were intended to come in for food and shelter.  The people who owned the barn and lived in the sprawling farmhouse adjacent to it still owned cows, as we saw - their herd, located in a bigger, dedicated barn a good distance from the horse barn and arena, was at least 50 strong.  The country around was absolutely beautiful - rolling hills and green pastures as far as the eye could see, and apparently the people who owned the farm owned a great deal of the surrounding land, as well.  Having seen most of the interesting parts of the farm, we returned to check on the progress of the horse.  The trainer had decided that she had worked hard enough for the day and was bringing her back into the barn.  By this time it was already well past seven and clear that we wouldn't be riding that day.  I was a little disappointed at this, but mostly just happy to be around horses again.  A lesson was starting in the indoor arena and I watched that for awhile, and noted uneasily that my German was certainly not advanced enough to be able to understand the instructor who stood in the middle of the arena and muttered half-audible instructions to the riders.  Growing bored of watching the lesson, I wandered back over to where Mirjam was, expecting that we would leave soon.  However, she turned to me a tad sheepishly and explained that there was to be a celebration that night for some of the other boarders and her friends; one woman had just begun a new job, and someone else had recently celebrated a birthday.  I didn't mind staying and participating in the celebration, just felt a little awkward since I didn't know anyone there but Mirjam.  Nonetheless the dozen or so people who gathered around the table to celebrate were very cordial and friendly, though they were understandably more interested in talking among themselves.  So I contented myself with sitting back and listening to their conversation, which I could mostly understand, and sampling from the generous spread (glad for the excuse not to have to make supper at the Wohnheim).  There were hamburgers, lots of fruit, and some other strange meats and cheeses (Germans love their fancy meats).  And - because it was a German celebration - there was plenty of alcohol.  In addition to beer, which can pretty much be assumed to be anywhere there could be an excuse for it in Germany, there was wine and champagne.  Partially out of politeness and partially out of curiosity, I did not decline a cup of strawberry wine when it was offered to me - and though I swear the bottle said wine, it was a carbonated drink.  It actually tasted pretty good, better than any of the beer or champagne I had tasted.  I also eventually worked up my courage and picked up a "grapefruit beer" from the table to try it.  Now, I wouldn't know, because I've never been concerned with alcohol in the US, but I'm fairly sure that flavored beers like this one are a strictly German thing.  On the table that night alone was grapefruit, mango, apple, and cactus.  I really like grapefruit juice and it had been recommended to me during Princeton in Munich that the grapefruit beer was the best because of the combination of the sour grapefruit juice and the bitter beer flavors.  Also, the brew was a mere 3.4% alcohol, and the bottle was 1/3 of a liter, so I didn't think there was much danger of me becoming raging drunk on it ;)  It was surprisingly good, and I even thought "Hey, I could get used to this" before catching myself and remembering that I was drinking alcohol :$.

Once I had finished off my drink and well-satisfied myself on treats, it being already around 9:30, I was getting fidgety and ready to go, although Mirjam was obviously enjoying herself and didn't make any signs of being ready to leave.  Nonetheless, noticing my agitation, she graciously asked whether I would like to go back, and when I sheepishly affirmed this, she lost no time in taking her leave of our hosts.  I very much enjoyed myself that day, and Mirjam gave me an open invitation to come back whenever I wanted, as she went to the stables nearly every day after work.  I even got an email that next day from her friend who rides at the Quarter Horse stable telling me that if I wanted to know more about that, I should just go over there and ask for her.  However, somehow (and I honestly am not quite sure how) got quite busy over the next few weeks and never made it back.  The weather wasn't very cooperative, either - it has rained here nearly nonstop for the past month, and I wasn't too keen on going to the barn when it was raining and there would be even less chance of us riding, even if they have an indoor arena.  However, I finally had both the idea and the opportunity to ask again this week, and tomorrow I will once again accompany Mirjam to the stables.  I can only hope that this time we may ride, but I don't want to be too forward about it - Mirjam's horse is young and inexperienced, and most of the other animals at the barn are likewise privately owned, so my chances are slim.  But I'll let you know how it goes, regardless!

My 9-5

I am doing my internship here at the Clausthal University of Technology, founded in 1781 as a miner's training school in this little mining town up in the mountains.  Today it is one of the more prestigious technical universities in the country, with departments such as Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Metalworking, and the institute that I work at, Polymers and Plastics Engineering.  Like a true German university, it does not have a "campus" in the American sense, but the university's lecture halls and laboratories are instead intermingled with the town (which in itself is not all that large, so it's never far to get to classes).  Fortunately, PuK (which stands for Polymerwerkstoffe und Kunststofftechnik, the German name of the institute where I work) is about a three-minute walk down a path from my dorm.  One side of the building houses the offices of the grad students, faculty, and supervising professor (in Germany Professor is a very high title, even more so than Doctor), while the other side is the laboratory/workshop, or Technikum.  There are easily a full score of grad students in the institute, several faculty, and a few technicians also, who work more in the Technikum and maintain the machines there.  It also seems that every grad student and faculty member has at least two interns - there have to be twenty of us at the institute, at least.  It makes coordination occasionally very interesting, as there are only a limited number of machines for compiling and testing samples, and everyone's projects progress at different rates.

The first day of my internship, Leif (my supervisor; I was supposed to have a grad-student advisor, but he finished his thesis and left the institute in mid-July, so I just report directly to Leif) took me around and introduced me to everyone, so I can recognize the people who work in the institute, but I am still only sure of a few names, and always afraid that I'm going to mix people up.  For the most part, the grad students and faculty speak fluent English, but since they found out that I had been studying German and can sometimes carry on a reasonably intelligent conversation, some of them prefer to speak with me in German.  At the very first, I preferred Leif to speak with me in German many times, too, because I wanted to practice, but now six weeks in I'm beginning to get tired of this foreign language thing and usually choose to speak English regardless.  The coworkers are ALWAYS helpful and very nice, though, and if I need help with something like learning how to work a machine, or fix it when it's not working correctly, or have a problem with my computer or anything, they're always more than happy to help.

I usually go in to the institute around 8:15, because that's about the time Leif gets there and I often like to check in with him before starting anything for the day.  However, if I've been given a specific task on my project to do and I know exactly what I need to do, I often like to come in earlier, even as early as 7:00, because I've more or less maintained this ridiculously early schedule (most days I get up at 5:00, or occasionally allow myself to sleep until 6:30) so it's not a stretch at all for me to come in so early.  This has led to the problem of me working ahead of schedule, which I think occasionally frustrates Leif because he expects me to spend several days working on something, but I come back only a couple of days later looking for something else to do.  Since I come in early I often leave early, as well, sometimes as early as 3:30 (although I'm technically supposed to stay until 5).  But if my work for the day is done, I'd much rather get back to my room where I can do as I please, or even take a bike ride if the weather is nice (which isn't often) than hang around the institute doing nothing productive.  I'm also given a one-hour lunch break, and most of the interns eat at the Mensa (dining hall), but I've never gone - since this fiasco with the money, I just can't justify going to a cafeteria and buying overpriced mystery meat when I can just make a sandwich or warm up some leftover pasta - which is what I normally do.  On the days when I bring a sandwich and an apple to work, I don't even go back to my room for lunch - just sit outside and eat my simple fare, which takes about twenty minutes, and then get back to work.

My project itself is titled "Investigating Ideal Maleic Anhydride-grafted Polypropylene (MAPP) - Natural Fiber Ratios in Various Polymer Systems."  It's a little bit of Mechanical Engineering, a lot of Materials Science, and a little bit of Chemistry (which I avoid like the plague, since I haven't taken chemistry since my junior year of high school :P).  Reinforcing plastics (polymers) with fibers isn't exactly a new technology, but there's still a lot of research in the area.  Polymers by themselves are rather soft and pliable, so adding fibers helps strengthen the material and make it more resistant to things like heat deformation or fatigue, as long as the bonds between the fibers and polymer are good.  Carbon fibers generally work the best, but they're awfully expensive.  Glass fibers are a good, cheaper alternative, but they're WAY heavier than carbon fibers - and in the applications where FRC (fiber-reinforced compounds) are used, like the automotive industry, more weight is generally a bad thing.  Natural fibers, such as flax, cotton, hemp, and jute, are a very attractive option because they're lighter than glass, cheaper than carbon, and (because they're natural) both abundant and recyclable.  But the particular problem with natural fibers is that they don't bond with the polymer very well, since the fibers are organic and very hydrophilic or polar (after all, the job of these molecules in nature is often to transport water) while the polymers are hydrophobic or nonpolar.  And that's the extent of my chemistry, but suffice it to say that by themselves, natural fibers and polymers don't like to mix. So if you make natural-fiber reinforced polymers and then put any sort of force on them, the fibers actually weaken the material because they get in the way of the polymer bonding to itself and just slip out of the surrounding polymer without putting up any resistance.  So the only option is to modify the fibers somehow, either physically or chemically.  That's where this other class of molecules comes in called compatibilizers.  The particular one that I am investigating is maleic anhydride-grafted polypropylene, or MAPP.  It basically is an acid connected to a polymer.  The acid bonds well with the fiber and wraps around it, and the polymer on the other side is much more agreeable to bonding with other polymers than the polar fibers.  However, MAPP is polypropylene, a very specific polymer.  And, surprisingly enough, most polymers don't mix very well with each other.  So while we know that putting fibers, MAPP, and polypropylene together works very well, we're less sure how well this would work if we used any other polymer.  So that's what I'm testing - whether MAPP improves bonding with these other polymers (specifically, polystyrene, polybutylene terephthalate, and polyamide 6.10, if you care) as well as it does with polypropylene.

Since I'm working so fast on my project, however, sometimes I find myself with nothing to do.  After begging Leif for some sort of useful work, and getting fed up with him dumping me off on other coworkers to "see how things worked" that were never going to be helpful to me, I thought of a plan.  Still mindful of my woefully reduced stipend, I asked Leif whether there was any work I could do for the institute, such as secretarial duties, which I could potentially be paid for.  He thought for a bit, then had an epiphany - since I am familiar with German (and more importantly, know how to properly use a dictionary), he suggested that I could help by translating some lectures that the professor at the institute had given from German into English.  Now, I envisioned receiving a transcript of a lecture, or perhaps a well-organized and detailed outline to transcribe.  What I received instead were several enormous Powerpoint presentations - three 70 slides long, and one whopping 230 slides in length.  This wasn't at all what I had expected, and while one might think that it would be easier to translate a Powerpoint than an essay, it requires a MUCH greater range of vocabulary.  Most of the key terms used in the presentations, though engineering concepts, were words that I would never run across in normal conversation, so of course I didn't recognize the German words.  However, armed with a physical copy of a Plastics Engineering German-English dictionary, and a couple reliable web dictionaries, I plunged into the work.  I soon found, however, that this task was going to be much more tedious than I first thought.  Changing bullet points and text boxes was easy enough, but since these were engineering lectures and not English presentations, they naturally included many graphs, diagrams and tables to illustrate the concepts.  Precious few of these graphics were created in Powerpoint with easy-to-edit text boxes; instead they were .jpg files of scanned textbooks and internet images.  Therefore all captions, labels, and other information, which was all in German, had to be painstakingly translated word by word through the use of individual text boxes which had to be created then formatted to fit within the image by size, font, color, and a white background to obscure the underlying German text.  And of course, my OCD would not let me simply keep these translated pieces at one font, but I wanted to try and make them fit with the rest of the image (particularly when there were other words in the image which were similar enough to English, lacking perhaps one silent 'e' or something, that I didn't bother to translate them).  Since I brought a part of this meticulousness on myself, perhaps I cannot complain, but it was powerfully tedious work.  However, I am now much more familiar with German engineering terms and understand natural fibers and polymers better now (which will help me with my understanding of my project), so it was far from a waste.  Not to mention I will be getting paid something above 7 Euros/hour for my labors, of which I have already logged 25 hours, so I really cannot complain - the sum will certainly help me buy groceries in my last couple of weeks here, and perhaps even an extra souvenir or two!

After I finish all of these subject-specific mini-posts about aspects of my life here in Clausthal, I'll go back to weekly summaries (which will be much shorter than they have been, as I've already explained to you broadly everything that I'm doing).  I'll tell you specifics about what work I've been doing on my project then - hopefully before I'm done with it!  Until then, keep smiling!