Sneak Preview

Well, the plan was to have a whole bunch of blog entries in reserve that I could release one by one and make it look like I'm blogging regularly again.  But since that never happened before the insanity of starting a new semester, I'll give you this (unusually brief but loaded) one now and promise to try and resume regular journaling when I can.  Scotland's amazing, BTW, as was my Eurotour, and I can't wait to tell you about them :) In the meantime, here's a preview of coming attractions to whet your appetite ;)


Monday morning (June 18) I dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 for that long-overdue shower.  After a quick breakfast my roomate Lisa and I packed up and headed to the train station.  This was the day that the Ruhr Fellows met with their companies to get a better idea of what they would be doing in their internships starting the next month.  Since the internship is basically the reason I applied to the program, I was really looking forward to this.  It took a good 90 minutes on two trains, a bus and a few block's walking before we arrived at the gate of Vaillant, GmbH, which made me very glad that I would have a host family in the town of Remscheid for the duration of the internship and wouldn't be making this commute every day.  We had an appointment with the HR manager at 10, and after I responded to his introduction with an easy "Freut mich" (literally "I'm glad", it's short for "Es freut mich, dich kennen zu lernen" = Pleased to meet you) he looked a little confused and asked us whether we should proceed in English or German.  I would have liked to try German, but Lisa was more hesitant and I could understand her reasoning that when discussing important things like contracts, we should really be sure we were understanding everything.  The contract was short and straightforward and stated that I was to work 35 hours per week sometime between 6:30am and 6:00pm Monday-Friday, that it was a completely unpaid internship (the idea of payment for the extra four weeks had been mentioned at one point, but it might have caused complications with visas, so I didn't really mind when it didn't materialize), and that I shouldn't spill company secrets, blah, blah, blah. Perfectly reasonable.  Then after an introductory presentation about the company, during which I tried to pay attention and ask intelligent questions, (it was less boring than some of the presentations I had endured during the Ruhr Fellows program, thankfully), we were joined by two more men who turned out to be our internship advisors.  Dr. Jochen Wriske is a tall, blond, soft-spoken and mild-mannered man with piercing blue eyes that peer out from behind thick glasses.  He speaks English without much of an accent in an almost timid voice, and as we split up and walked to what would be our home departments for the next 8 weeks, he confided in me that I should correct his English whenever it was possible to do so without embarrassing him in front of his superiors (as we switched to German fairly early on in the internship, I think I only had the opportunity to oblige him two or three times, which is fine because I hate correcting other people's English).  The tour of the department was really a tour of the coworkers, as I was taken around to every desk in the building and introduced as "the American student who will be doing her internship with us for the next 8 weeks" (in German, of course).  Most people, hearing "American", greeted me in English, to which I replied softly and succinctly in German, eliciting the ubiquitous surprised exclamations of "You speak German?!" Honestly, it makes me wonder what image America is sending to the Germans if EVERY SINGLE PERSON I meet is shocked that I can actually speak German at a reasonably fluent level.  It's also more than a little embarrassing to constantly receive compliments on how good my German is.  How am I supposed to reply to that? "Thanks, you too"? "Well, I try"? for as much practice as I have meeting that compliment, I have yet to find a really gracious way to move on with the conversation.  (Suggestions welcome.)

After meeting at least 50 people, of whom I may have remembered 12 names at the end of the 8 weeks, it was (thankfully) lunchtime.  Vaillant has a cafeteria, and the food is fairly good and more than reasonably priced.  Entrees range from 3-5 Euros apiece, but there is also a special "government-subsidized" option which is 2 Euros for a meal (usually meat, vegetables, and a starch) as well as a bowl of soup and a dessert.  It doesn't get much better than that (which is also how I was able to spend less then 500 Euros during my entire 8 weeks of internship, and that includes the 100+ I spent in Luxembourg… but all that later).  So, of course, I nearly always ate the cheap option, though sometimes it looked so completely unappetizing (chili or soup, for example) or the other options looked so delicious (for instance, they served pizza about once a week) that I splurged and spent 4-5 Euros on my lunch instead. After lunch I was also shown the company convenience store, where the really important part was the ice cream cooler.  On especially unbearable days I would cheer myself up with a creamy treat after lunch, even if it meant doubling my food spending for the day.

The afternoon consisted of a meeting with my advisors (I actually had another advisor besides Jochen, since he would be on vacation for a good three weeks during my internship) during which my project for the summer was explained.  I would be working on a new sensor to monitor the proportion of fuel and air in the mixture that enters the gas-powered water heaters which are Vaillant's specialty.  This is especially important now because the quality of natural gas, which has until now been relatively steady and predictable, will in the future begin to vary as current wells run out and gas has to be drawn or purchased from several sources.  At the present time, boilers are calibrated to the type of gas available in their region and then set to run, as deviations from the ideal will happen on a large enough time scale for regular maintenance to be able to address them.  However, when the gas quality is changing drastically from month to month or even day to day, there needs to be a flexible system in place which can adapt to these changes.  I would be working to develop such a system in the most cost-effective and easily integrable way possible.  I was very happy with this assignment, because even if it wasn't in my favorite field (thermodynamics and electronics are far from my strong suit), it was well-defined, practical and applicable, which is exactly what I was missing in my internship last year and hoping to find this year.  My advisors turned out to be great about giving me enough definite instruction that I didn't feel lost while still leaving me room for creative thinking and adding my own input, another way I was hoping this program would improve on last year's experience.

The last item on the agenda was meeting our host families.  Jochen was actually to host Lisa (I guess they didn't want me to have to be around my advisor 24/7) except for the three weeks of vacation, in which she would need to move to Cologne.  My host father was another company employee, though from a completely different department.  Harald Brokamp is a giant of man about my dad's age who wears almost exclusively blue dress shirts and blue jeans and looks out at the world with a keen engineer's gaze behind large glasses under a tousled head of gray hair.  His English is also very good, though he speaks with a stronger German accent than Jochen (as a matter of fact, I didn't hear him speak enough English to notice this until the very end of my internship when my host parents met my younger sister and boyfriend over Skype).  He lives in one of the area's traditional slate-shingled houses built at the beginning of the last century which he has (mostly) renovated, together with his girlfriend, Carla Sommer (around the same age), and their poodle, Charlie (one year old).  I have the impression that Europe is rather more accepting of these… alternative… living arrangements than we are in America, though it is only in the older generations that it really seems to raise any complaint.  Once the host families had exchanged phone numbers with Lisa and I and preliminarily discussed our arrival in two weeks, our program came to an end.  Seeing as it was only 2:45, Lisa and I sauntered back to the train station, looking forward to a leisurely afternoon.  We made it to the first train transfer all right, at which I looked at the schedule and saw that the next train headed to Dortmund was an IC (InterCity), one of the faster train types.  Lisa expressed doubts that our semester tickets were valid on this type of train, but I assured her that that only extended to ICEs (InterCity Express).  Unfortunately, not only did Lisa turn out to be correct, but we were controlled before even reaching the next stop.  That was an unpleasant surprise, and an expensive mistake - 14 Euros each for a 40-minute journey from the unfeeling conductor who brusquely informed me that our tickets were only valid on regional transportation.  I actually needed to withdraw money and had only 5 Euros in my wallet that day, so Lisa had to lend me enough to pay the ticket (or fine, depending on how you see it) and I spent the rest of the journey in sheepish silence.  It went better than it could have - I think technically we were riding illegally and could have been subject to a 40-Euro additional fee had the conductor been feeling particularly grumpy.  As it was, we were back at the CDC by 4:30 and I enjoyed a few hours of relatively good internet connection before calling it a day.