I am working now just over three months at the Centre for Research into Atmospheric Chemistry at University College Cork in Cork. It seems ages since I first arrived here in an unfamiliar city in an unfamiliar country. But now after living in Cork for almost four months everything is familiar. I know my way in the country, in the city and around the university, and feel completely comfortable with it.
My internship is going fine. Last week I discussed with my supervisor and head of the department about finalizing my time with them. We discussed how the internship report should look like and about the way of assessing my work. I also told them when I want to have my last day, which is perfectly fine with them.
Friday 29 January 2010 is my last day. And on Tuesday 2 February I take the plane back to Holland.
The last weeks were pretty busy. I finally got my share of lab work. Together with a postdoc we are trying to develop a method to analyze anions and cations on quartz fiber filters after these are loaded with particle matter somewhere outdoors. It is fun to do but takes a lot of time. Everything we try something, run the samples in an ion chromatograph, look at the results, and try to improve the method. Besides the lab work I worked together with a PhD student on a data set with various air quality indicators. We had to remove weird values caused my instrumental errors and line everything up in one excel file. In this file we marked values that indicate events such as ship plumes, domestic burning and traffic. Each event results in an increase in different air quality indicators. It gave me a good opportunity to work with a real data set and to contribute to the work done in the research group.
Coming week I try to finish the lab work and then in January I have to work hard on my report. I can already say that it is a successful time in this research group!
Last week was also a party week. Christmas is a big thing here and the Christmas spirit starts already right after Halloween. It is normal for classes, departments and companies to have Christmas parties. Last Wednesday 16 December we had our Christmas party. Around 4pm everyone gathered in our office to have a drink before we went to the city center for dinner in a restaurant. The restaurant ‘Market Lane’ at Oliver Plunkett Street offered a great Christmas menu. My choice was French onion soup with gruyere and croutons, followed by Roast duck breast with herbed potatoes and peppers wrapped in smoked bacon with red wine jus. My desert was Raspberry sorbet with fresh fruit. All three courses were excellent! After dinner we went to a pub called ‘The Old Oak’. In here we had our own room where we spent the night talking and drinking. At 2.30 the pub closed and a very nice party came to an end.
On Thursday quite a few suffered from a hangover (I was only tired) so everyone started late, hardly worked, and went home early. This repeated itself more or less on Friday. Most people started on time but we stopped early to join another Christmas party. Another part of the department organized a Christmas drink Friday late afternoon.
Coming week will also be irregular. We will work until Wednesday 1pm until the university will close its doors until the 4th of January. However, quite a few take two weeks off so it will be quiet the coming days. I will work those days because suddenly the end of my internship is very near, and it scares me when I think of the work I have to do before then…