School Days, Work Place, Office Space

I previously said that I would be writing about university and what I do here. Today was an exceptional day, so it's the perfect opportunity to tell you about it all.

The degree programme for Automation Engineering in English only started this year, meaning that the university can only provide courses for first year students. Being third year, most of these courses are obsolete for me, so we cannot attend them. Instead, to earn our credits, we are doing some projects in the fields of the courses we should have taken. This is very cool, since we get to stay with the research personnel, have our own computers in the lab, and finally do something, instead of just writing notes during boring classes.

Here are some photos showing the three of us (Ioan, Sergiu and myself) at the office. The place is pretty cool. An amazing fact was that we found Counter-Strike on one of the computers. Ha ha...

One of the projects we're working on is hooking up a slot car track to a logical circuit and give different command through that circuit. We want to plan out the acceleration times of the car, maybe even programme it to optimise speeds and so on. Today, we fixed the track, fixed some cars, installed the sensors, arranged the wiring and just had a jolly old time. Here are some photos to your enjoyment.

After we finished the job, we just fooled around. It was great. Here is a video:

After that, we had a party for all the exchange students. It was great. I tasted good Finnish company (though I would have liked to taste some of them a bit more...), I tasted some good Finnish sausages (try to find that in your dictionary), and I tasted some good Finnish sauna. Yep. I have to tell you one thing... It's hot in there!

So, yes, I'm having the time of my life here. Also had a discussion with Laura from the Student Office, and she filled me in on the good life people have in Finland and about the problems they are facing. Thanks a lot for the info, sorry if I was a bother.

So, yes, life here is good. All of you readers out there, you are welcome to try it out!