I’m up at 5:00am writing these lines due to a wonderful jet-lag. I have been back in Ottawa for a whole day now and the desire of being a couch potato is creeping back. Also, I’m very sorry that I didn’t write a post before I left Germany as promised. It’s terrible that I have [...]

Dear all, This week is announcing to be quite hectic as my internship at the Forschungszentrum Jülich comes to an end and I need to prepare a formal report and a PowerPoint presentation to give to a big lab group on Wednesday. I feel quite silly because initially, I think my Ph.D. student only expected [...]

Yesterday night, I returned from an exhausting day in Cologne. I finally climbed the 500 something steps to the Bell tower of the Dom and then just hung out in the city for a while. That trek up the Bell tower was truly infernal – the stairs went on and on and on and I [...]

Today, I had lunch with a Nobel Prize winner. His name is Peter Grünberg and he is one of the Nobel Prize recipients for Physics in 2007. Yes, Nobel Prize winners are humans just like the rest of us but you can’t deny that it’s a bit awesome. Dr. Grünberg, along with Albert Fert of [...]

My general plan for this weekend was to travel to Cologne alone on Saturday and visit some touristy places, to stay in a youth hostel for the night and then to travel to Düsseldorf on Saturday morning to meet up with other RISE interns in the area. I did some research on the city of [...]

It’s down to six. Six weeks before I have to strap myself to an airplane seat and leave Germany. But it’s not time to say goodbye just yet so I will make sure to cram a trip in each and every one of those weekends, as well as become more fluent in German in the [...]

Hi everyone!  First of all, sorry for missing a post last week - I was busy preparing for a presentation and lab report for an unfinished course at my host university in Paris.  The presentation was scheduled to be in Paris, on Friday the 26th, which leads to one obvious and two joyful facts (for me at least): weekend trip to [...]

Hello all! This is my first contribution to this blog, and I will be sharing my experiences regularly up until the end of August. I am a 3rd year undergraduate student in Environmental Chemistry at McGill University in Montreal. But for the last 4 months I have been doing a semester studying abroad at Université [...]