21st May – My First Blog

Hi, my name is Philip Yorke.  I will be working at TU Dresden this summer as a research assistant for Matthias Brockel, who is doing a PhD in wave energy, and I will be blogging regularly on Thursdays.

I’m not starting my Reise exchange until the end of June, so I’m afraid that I’m still in England – in fact the last time I was in Germany was in December, when I got lost at Frankfurt airport and missed a connecting flight - I’m really hoping that my next trip is longer and more productive!  Thus unfortunately I have nothing to report about my placement yet!

I can tell you however that the sun is shining in Cambridge and that everyone apart from the engineering students is panicking because they have exams coming up in the next two weeks.  The engineers however had their exams at the start of term and so we are now relaxing and laughing at everyone else.  We do however have project work to do; I’ve got to prepare a long presentation in French and design and build a turbo-charger out of bits of aluminium by the first week in June, which is very random but rather cool.  After that I’m going to try to slip away to Germany for a week to practice my German for a bit – those projects mean that I can’t go off on the intensive language course without losing serious marks.

In the meantime I’m preparing for the trip; I’ve bought a massive German grammair book and an advanced vocabulary book (I did also see a bright yellow book the size of a phone directory called “501 common German verbs” in the same shop but I stopped short of buying it; one can have too much excitement in one’s life!) I’m also practicing my written German through writing badly incorrect e-mails to Maike who’s in charge of the blog and trying to get through to Rise because I’m still not quite sure what’s going on.  I’ve been told that Matthias is (or was?) ill and I think I might have messed the system up by applying to start so late, but if there’s anyone reading this blog who knows what is going on please get in touch – my official letter hasn’t come through yet!

Not much more to report, so I’m signing off until next week.  Tschüss, bis später!