The Rest of Berlin

Well I'm back from Berlin and now have a little time to write about it. I guess the first place is to start off is with the conference part of it. What I get to say is that I felt my presentation went really well. I think giving presentations is something that you just get better at as you do more of them. This was my 3rd presentation at a major conference and on top of that I've given presentations a lot in front of my research groups in Florida and Rome. I didn't think there would be too many people who were experts in my field at the talk so that took off a little pressure from me. For some reason I even just got more of a jolt of confidence. I reminded myself that this time last year I was leading praise and worship for Summer Crusade for Christ. This just means that I played guitar and led in the worship for our weekly meetings (all by myself). If anything I thought that that experience was the best in terms of prepping for presentations. I don't think I was ever more nervous than doing Praise and Worship. When it comes to Praise and Worship, Christians can be pretty critical. So I figured, if I can do that giving a scientific talk is no problem.

So I gave my talk and in a cool collected way and my talk was right on time (lasting 17 minutes just as requested). There weren't too many difficult questions asked, and when I was getting off the stage, this guy approached me and gave me his card. I realized he was an engineer from the Bosch company in the sensors division. That's a pretty well respected company in the engineering field if you didn't know. In my head, I was thinking "SWEET!". He requested that I send him a copy of my powerpoint (which means it must've been good). Although I told him it's unlikely that I will be able to, he told me to contact him anyways. So hopefully that will pay off once I actually do start looking for a job.

Being at the conference, I started to think ahead to life after grad school and academics. I've been losing some confidence in my ability to be a good researcher and have begun to wonder if I'm really cut out for this stuff. However, it was good to be around US students again who are in my same boat. I guess they reminded me that when it comes to that sort of thing, we are our own biggest critic. I did meet this one guy my age who has been working for an engineering company doing materials engineering stuff after getting a degree in Business. He explained to me at this stage of our lives, we can work in many places regardless of our background and even our successes. Our degrees just show that we have the ability to be trained and sometimes it takes the right connections to get ahead. That was quite eye opening. I guess it also gave me a lot confidence that many people even reminded me about how my time abroad will exemplify my ability to adjust to different situations.

The rest of my time in Berlin was spent just hanging out with some of the American students I met that were there on a special program. I honestly didn't see any sights. There were a group of Germany students who were also helping out with the conference so they offered to take us out to dinner one night. Oh it was good. We had plenty of beer and I ate this great dish of Pork with Potato Dumplings.