Today was a long day, with two company visits and several cultural activities. It all started this morning when we had to get up at 7:00, do the usual routine of getting ourselves into clothes and enjoying the hotel breakfast. As a full-fledged Dutch caffeine addict, I find it increasingly hard to get up without a strong ‘bakkie pleur’. Luckily, this changed later this day, but I’ll tell about that later.
Click here to read more...A special day for our tour today: we've already spent half of our planned time here and we have also already visited half of our scheduled companies. The time flies when you're doing interesting and fun stuff, and this completely proves that! Today we visited Cymer, an ASML company specialized in light sources used for photolithography, and MaxLinear, which told us about their Analog Digital Converter (ADC) ICs. Today was also the first time during the tour that we heard about Moore's Law (we definitely thought that we would here that much sooner)!
Click here to read more...Today, Monday 9th of May, a visit at Thales was scheduled. However this visit was scheduled for the afternoon, so the morning could be used for other activities.
So the morning started, as every morning, with a breakfast. The breakfast of the Laguna Hill Lodge accommodation is quite good, so that’s a good start. Afterward we had some spare time. Because the sky was clouded, the aqua-gym session of this morning was cancelled. However that generated for me some time to do my laundry, which was a nice thing. Others just chilled in their rooms or did some groceries for dinner (one group had the nice idea to try to prepare fresh food in the microwave, it did worked but it wasn’t that tasty). However after I finished the laundry it was time to travel to Thales.
To start the second part of the study tour well, we enjoyed a day without any planned activities. This was a day to accommodate to the new environment of Los Angeles. Most of us slept in a bit, to compensate for the long day of travel yesterday. However, as the breakfast was open until 10 o'clock, we were all active at a reasonable time.
Click here to read more...Today was a great day for SPOCK, so a great day for whole Canada. We were flying to America.
Click here to read more...This Friday we went to the university of Toronto. The day started with a tour around various engineering labs. The first lab we visited was a structural testing facility. Structures from the CN tower and the Rogers centre were tested in this lab. Other labs we visited were the aerospace lab, with a mechanical cockpit simulator and multiple wind tunnels, and the intelligent transportation systems lab, where among other things it is simulated what would happen if everybody would try to leave Toronto at the same time. The conclusion is that everybody’s screwed.
Click here to read more...Today, the fourth day of the studytrip, we had an early rise. This was not because of an morning gymnastics class, but because of the long drive that we had to make. We were going to visit the University of Waterloo, which is a 1.5 hour drive from Toronto. In Canadian terms this is peanuts, but we as Dutch people aren't used to driving so far. I guess it is something we have to get used to the coming weeks. So we took a quick breakfast at the hostel and we drove off. After fighting the morning traffic jams on what was described as one of the busiest highways on the American continent, we arrived at the university of Waterloo.
Click here to read more...After a short night, our alarms sounded at around half past six in the morning. After getting prepared and eating our breakfast, we headed for a one-and-an-hour drive to SNC Lavalin. SNC Lavalin is a big company in the energy sector and is amongst other things active in oil and gas, mining, infrastructure and nuclear energy. This morning, we visited the nuclear energy department of SNC Lavalin.
Click here to read more...The study tour Beyond Frontiers is now fully started and this day's programme was maximally full. With an early rise and shine at 7:00 AM and after enjoying the breakfast, our group took off to the first company of the day: Xerox Research Center Canada. The mini vans picked up yesterday were used to get us all to the center which was located outside downtown Toronto. Cd's with music were distributed over the 4 minivans in a random way and our van happened to have some nice gangster rap music, so with pumping beats we left the hostel.
Click here to read more...After a good night sleep, even though some still had to combat their jetlag, our first day in Toronto turned out to be a rather nice one!
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