Today was the day we had all been waiting for. Presentation day. In order to be prepared my group decided to head over to the University of Augsburg early so that we would have enough time to eat lunch and practice our presentation with the German students, who still had classes that day. For lunch…
Tag: Summer 2018
Day 10: Are H&K okay?
Today is our last site visit at Horauf and Kohler and it only reminds me that the program is soon coming to an end. The program has gone really fast and I’m excited for these last few days but also do not want it to end. To begin our day we woke up bright and…
Day 9: The Site Visit I Was Waiting For
Day nine is the day we would be visiting KUKA which is probably the site visit I had become most excited for. I was excited mainly because at all the other companies we visited they had at least one KUKA robot present, so I was interested in seeing the company that seemed to be a…
Day 8: Dachau Concentration Camp
Today was the day that we would be visiting a concentration camp. Although I knew it would be an emotionally hard day I was still interested in attending as I had visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. with my school both last year and the year before, and I was interested in seeing in…
Bis zum nächsten Mal, Deutschland!
It’s been several days since I arrived back in the U.S. I kept putting off writing this last post because I felt that if I wrote it, it would assert such a degree of finality that I was not prepared to handle. I missed Germany, I missed the group, and I missed the adrenaline rush…
Day 7: The Day I Spent All My Money
Today was the day that we would be heading to Munich to spend the day there. Munich is a pretty big city so I was excited to get to experience what a city in Germany was like, since Augsburg was more a rural type area. To get to Munich we had to take a train…
Day 6: 19th Birthday
Day six of the trip was a pretty special for me as it was the day of my 19th Birthday. I was extremely thankful to be able to be spending my birthday is a foreign country but was also dreading this day a bit as it was the day that was marked in the calendar…
Post Trip Reflection
I cannot believe that our two weeks are over! The time flew by and feels like it slipped right away from me! While most of the group traveled back home today, I am staying an extra week in Germany to travel a little more and to visit a friend who lives in Dusseldorf. While I…
Day 5: Cinderella’s Castle
Today is the day we would be visiting Neuschwanstein Castle. This was the day I was pretty much the most excited for before coming on the trip as the castle looked exactly like a Disney castle in photos and looked absolutely breathtaking (it was). To get to the castle we had to take a bit…
Day 13: Our Austrian Adventure!
Today was last full day in Germany and also our free day. We split up into different groups today, and headed out to different excursions – either to Nuremburg for a festival, Stuttgart to meet family, or Salzburg, Austria for the day. I was in the group of 14 who got up early to catch…
Day 4: Regensburg – The Town I Want To Move To
Another day in Germany, another day we woke up early to visit another site. This site visit was important as we would be visiting the company that my group was responsible for, Continental. I was excited to visit this company as I had though that they solely produced only tires but through further research I…
5/8-Exhaustion Sets In
Today was just as full as yesterday. We began by visiting a carbon fiber company, SGL. They make material for the frames of some BMW vehicles as well as carbon fiber baseball bats, and all kinds of products for companies. Bikes, molds, you name it. Their technical presentation was a bit long and highly technical…
5/7-Experiencing Augsburg
We had another excellent day. We began by visiting the University of Augsburg and met our groups for the presentations we will be giving while here. We worked for about an hour on our introductory presentations and gave them to our fellow students. I was able to work pretty well with the students and we…
Day 13: “Casually Takes a Day Trip to Austria”
Friday, May 18 Today was the last day of the Plus3 Germany program, and we had it all to ourselves. There were no planned group activities for this day, and 14 of us actually wound up going to Salzburg, Austria for the day. We met in the lobby at 7:45 to walk to the Augsburg…
Thanks for the Memories
“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading” (Kazuo Ishiguro). While writing these blogs, I had moments where I was unable to continue typing a story because I was laughing too hard at the memories…
Day 3: First Site Visits and 1972 Olympics
Once again I woke up early to prepare for what would be out first Site visit. I didn’t know what to expect of the site visit but nevertheless was excited to get to see first hand an environment that an engineer could be working in. After rushing down stairs and missing breakfast, as I had…
Day 12: “Obama’s House”
Thursday, May 17 With the looming cloud of the final presentations behind us, it was time to have some fun again. We skipped the hotel breakfast in favor of a traditional Bavarian breakfast in the nearby small town of Baindlkirch. The restaurant we entered was not like any we had experienced thus far: it was…
Day 11: The Culmination of All Our Hard Work
Wednesday, May 16 We had a later start than normal today, but the first and only activity for that day would not take place until 5:30 PM: the final presentation. The majority of us went to the university, first to eat lunch in the Mensa, then to work on last-minute details of the presentations that…
Day 10: The Fate of Hörauf & Kohler
Tuesday, May 15 This morning we hopped on the street car at around 9:30 to go and take a tour of Hörauf & Kohler. This company specializes in injection molding and makes plastic parts for the automobile industry. The person who would normally give the tour in English was not there, so we had a…
Day 9: “Who touched my robot?”
Monday, May 14 This morning at 9:15 we left the hotel to catch a street car to the University, where we listened to a talk about German politics. The presentation was very interesting because it brought up many connections between current political issues in America and in Germany. One main theme is this concept of…