Day 4!! We had a very interesting and informative morning at the School of Engineering. We started with a nursing focused presentation, which I found so intriguing. We learned about the nursing education in Spain, and the healthcare system in Europe. We compared it with the United States and the key striking difference I saw was involving clinical schedules. In Spain they have clinical during for a longer period of time. The first year, clinical is for 1 month, the second year it is 2 months, the third year 3 months, the fourth year it is for 6 months. I thought this was very interesting because they aren’t in class during their clinical so it’s more similar to a full-time job. Whereas in the United States, during nursing school we don’t have clinical full time and instead we have a mix of classes and clinical. He also went over some research he did with reusing pacemakers, which really caught my attention since I haven’t learned anything similar to this before.

Next, we had a more engineering focused presentation, which went into the process of creating medical devices. He went into detail about each step of the process and the key important parts of each. We went into a detailed discussion on prosthetic limbs; the details of creating specific prosthetics for different needs and overall learning about the balance and cooperation from doctors and engineers when creating devices like these.

After lunch, we went to such a fun and entertaining cooking class. We made pintxos, tortillas, and a tasty dessert! It was so cool to make these fun foods and this was such a fun activity to do as a group. It was very interesting to make these Basque dishes, which definitely helped me see even more of the culture in Bilbao. Afterwards we had a quick walking tour with Professor Saioa, shopped for a little bit and got to relax in our rooms! It was such a good day and I can’t wait for tomorrow!!