My first full day on the job today. First at nine, we had a staff meeting where everyone discusses their work plans for the week in Beate’s group. Then the entire Entox group met up for seminar, which the boss was giving. Beate forewarned me about him and all I can say is oh my god. He would have failed with that presentation in school. It was just minuscule diagrams that he copied from the paper. I felt really bad because he seemed like a nice guy and made an effort, but he was awful at presenting. He had no sense of order and kept trying to show cause and effect even though his experiment could only prove correlation. Stuff that I’ve learned in basic psychology classes.
Afterwards, I followed Hanne around as she did an I-PAM bioassay. She was analyzing 24 water samples from different stages in a water treatment plant. Some of them were disgusting looking, brown. As they progressed, they turned green, and then clear. Basically the process involves a lot of pipetting, analyzing the growth of bacteria in the samples, and after adding the algae, testing the luminescence with the I-PAM machine. We had to measure the absorbance of a diluted algae sample to begin with, but the UV-Vis machine would not work! It was really old, but the older machine was more accurate than the newer machine. After two hours, it finally worked again and Hanne could proceed.
While I was in the lab, someone opened one of the -80 °C freezers. It was totally frosted and white in the inside! I was pretty tired by the end of the day; it was already dark when we left. Since the 21st of June is the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, it’s actually midwinter here with the longest night. On the way home, I was trying to figure out what planet I kept seeing. Apparently, everything’s flipped here. The sun still rises east to west, but the moon travels opposite and all the stars are switched too. I’ve also found myself getting used to the left side of the road driving system. It’ll be weird back in the
This evening, I saw my first bat in the wild. It flew up from a tree for a second and it was huge like the ones I saw at Lone Pine. Crazy stuff.
An interesting fact for you: Everyone who goes to school, not college, here has to wear a uniform. The younger kids’ uniforms usual include a wide brimmed hat which they need in order to go outside for recess. Girls have to wear long skirts past their knees when they’re older.
3 comments:
your job seems pretty complicated (maybe because I know nothing about it. LOL!)
And well, students in my country have to wear uniforms too since they enter kindergarten. :) I'll post a picture of a standard school uniform here if I can find take a pic of my students wearing it. Some schools have another set of uniform apart from the standard one.
That job sounds like a lot of fun! Only kids in some schools have to wear uniforms. Not at my high school, but some private schools.
Uniforms ftl. Tis like that in England also.
The moon thing sounds weird, but makes sense. Strange, but awesome.
And lawl @ failed presentation.
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