Finally, a full night of sleep after a hectic last 48 hours, I woke up with a jolt of energy. We took a street car at 7 AM to the University and this was my first time taking it. It is a very effective and clean way of transportation, and is one of the defining parts of the city. The ride was about 20 minutes and it dropped us right in front of the University. My first impression walking onto campus was how much different it was from Pitt which honestly I was expecting. The University isn’t in the city like Pitt, it is an enclosed campus like Penn State which it reminded me of. The campus was beautiful, but for how many students go there, the campus was practically empty. 

We made our way to the classroom where we are going to conduct our work for the next 2 weeks and it was a lot like the classrooms we have at the business school. We got together with our groups for the first time and prepared for our introduction presentations. The German students in my group were so nice and inviting, I was a little nervous before meeting all of them because I wasn’t sure what they would think of us. My group was BMW and I thought we did a good job with the time frame we were given. We then had a short break before listening to Patrick Will from Audi talk about corporate strategy. He had some interesting points about the history of the company and addressed the challenges in the industry at the moment. He talked about how electric vehicles are going to fully take over the industry.

After that we went to the Mensa, which is their version of the Eatery, and it was very cool and the Asian food was awesome. The weird thing is that it opens at 11:30 AM so it was packed when we got there around 1 PM. We then embarked on a scavenger hunt and my guide was Marius, who is one of the grad students who will be at Pitt in the fall. He was a great tour guide and showed us some beautiful sites around the city, and we ended at the brewery where I got my first taste of some non-alcoholic beer.

We ended the night at the Italian restaurant where I got the salami pizza, and I’m not gonna lie, it was some of the worst pizza I have had. The salami was very undercooked, and the marinara sauce was a lot sweeter than I’d see in the states. All in all though, it was a great day full of fun stuff and I’m excited to get after it at BMW(my company) tomorrow.