Ich bin ein Praktikant

So now I'm writing from Germany. It takes a bit longer to write because the keyboards are slightly different. The y and the z keys are switched, so I do a lot of stopping and deleting. But there are also some wonderful new keys, like ä, ö, and ü and the @ symbol is hidden in a place that's easy to forget. I'm actually have way used to all of this cause I lived here before, but it's still fun to go through the whole adjustment process once again. Yesterday I went grocery shopping like a real german! Inside I was just bursting with excitement even though it's should be a boring everyday task. But I'm sure zou (see the freaking mistakes I alwazs have to correct) don't want to hear about that part of my internship.

Yesterday I also began my internship. It's actually really great, everyone here is so nice and the research goes at a nice easy pace. They said that they don't expect everything from me right away and that it's totally ok when I make a mistake (which luckily I haven't yet) because I'm here to learn.

I actually got here last wednesday but my internship didn't start until yesterday, and seeing as most of Europe was on holiday on thursday (and of course not many people went to work on friday either, the even have it built into the calendar that way. Many holidays are followed by "bridge days" so people can sleep off their hangovers, I'm totally not kidding) I travelled to another part of Germany to visit a family I had lived with for a year. That was a lot of fun and I returned on Sunday.

So far I've done a lot of watching and listening, the day goes by pretty quickly and you don't feel like you've done much. There are no classes to go to. You just figure things out in your office and call the right people when you have questions can chat with your co-workers about problems and what to do next and stuff. So far they have about three or four machines that use liquid helium. We do experiments with sample crystals at very low temperatures and very high magnetic fields and very high pressures. We use so much Helium that we actually have an internal helium ventilation system. All the helium that get's vaporized in the tanks get's fed through the system to a cooler room where it's cooled to a liquid again and then used to fill up empty tanks. They're repairing one machine that, when we're finished, should be able to achieve temperatures as low as a few millikelvin and B fields as high as 20 Tesla!!! Right now my projects are to build a susceptometer and attach it to the part of the machine that holds the sample. It feels pretty crazy that I'm going to build something myself that they'll actually use to measure things with. I also have a lot of technical reading to do. Lock in Amplifiers, Susceptometers, and lots with Physical Property measurement systems (the big tanks and machines we use). Everyone seems to have a lot of confidence in me and they say it's easier than it sounds, so I'm worried, but hopeful. Well I gotta go! Till next time...