• Fried Bars of Gold...

Welp, the trip is almost over. Today was our last day at UPV, we presented our projects to a very small audience and had our last bocadillo del dia y café solo (that may have just been me on that last part…) Now we have the rest of this week to do a bit of travelling, before heading home Saturday. Which brings me to my current situation, sitting at a Burger King in the Valencian airport with Chris as we wait to board. We’ve got a mini adventure ahead of us for the next three days as we try our hand at northern Europe. Though at the moment, the only thing I can think about is the intoxicating aroma of Chris’s fries. The salty fried bars of gold are right in front of me, inches from my keyboard, do I sneak one? Maybe I can distract Chris for a moment before…okay he just finished the last one while I was typing that. Drat! Foiled again.

(cannot believe I missed those fries...)

Surprisingly, the thought of thieving away my comrade’s fries would not have ever crossed my mind at the beginning of the trip. And had I not been attempting to capture my dilemma forever in this blog, I probably would’ve just asked for some. That’s one difference I have certainly noticed about myself since coming to Spain. I am quite a bit more confident and forward than I was beforehand. Being thrust into a foreign situation, and then living in it, requires you to be much more assertive and confident in your decisions and actions. Especially when you don’t know the language! In addition to confidence, my ability to read through research papers and technical reports has exponentially increased. I feel that I now know when to skim, and when to slow down and focus. Additionally, the process of following “lines of research” is something I will most certainly be taking with me back to the states. This is something I used extensively during my time here in Spain, and allowed me to take on a completely new (to me anyway) interdisciplinary subject, and have a very good understanding of the processes that were occurring in the lab.

As one might expect, physics II (electricity and magnetism) and two semesters of chemistry certainly came in handy working in an electrochemistry lab. The concepts behind what we were doing and knowing how to achieve our desired results directly stemmed from those classes. Besides academic preparation, I would assert that working full time at both Calliope Talent and FedEx for several years helped my performance on my projects. Both jobs were goal oriented and time sensitive, they were jobs where I was given a task, and had to find a way to just get it done. It also meant that out of habit I was usually the first in the lab, and last to leave.

I don’t believe there were any challenges or difficulties between me and my mentor’s expectations. I thouroughly enjoyed the work Pablo handed down, and the only unease felt was fear of disappointing him. However it became clear within the first week of working with Pablo that I was excelling at my work (and then he gave me more so…maybe I should’ve slacked off juuuuust a bit.) Something I find quite interesting about universities in Spain (and I believe most of Europe), is that graduate programs are completely research oriented. This versus the US where it tends to be a mix of research and more course work. That’s not to say Spanish grad students get off easy, I saw the amount of papers Pablo (a PhD student) read in the last year….it was intimidating to say the least.

Now Chris and I are flying over France, I am finishing my last (official) blog entry, and the adventure continues.

(gonna miss Valencia)

PS – I’ll be updating this blog periodically on my return to the US, so watch out for some new (unofficial) entries!