Sports and engineering in Esslingen

I’ve been already for some time in Finland! I went back home from Esslingen on 23rd of February and was on purpose completely offline from the internet for a while. I was just enjoying the nice winter weather, the sauna and some good Finnish food with friends and family.

One funny thing is that I went back to Esslingen for a product development project 2.-11.3. We are eight Finnish and eight German students in this project and it continues until the end of May. We just had a kick-off week in Esslingen and we will try to finish the project on another intensive week in Jyväskylä in May. Right now I’m only making this project and one internet course with job application training and such.

I must say that during my exchange period my English and German got really a lot better! I’d say my English is pretty much completely fluent and I can communicate quite well in German too. Once in January when I was travelling by train some Germans first thought I was just speaking a dialect until I said I was from Finland I don’t understand much when Germans speak dialects but when I ask them to try to speak a bit more clearly I understand most of what they are saying

I’d say that the best things with my exchange period were improving my language skills, getting to know about different cultures and to get really great friends from many different cultures and countries.  The improvement of my language skills I would say were the biggest advantage of my exchange period.

Settling into the new country when I first came to Germany wasn’t that difficult, because their culture is quite similar to ours her in Finland. In the beginning when my German wasn’t so good, I managed quite well with English and body language Also the university took care of necessary paper work with the city and helped out in the beginning, so we exchange students didn’t have much to worry about.

Since the blog writing instructions tell me to write what courses I took in Esslingen, here they are:

Sustainable energy systems (8 ECTS): our teacher was the chairman of the German hydrogen fuel association and he knew what he was talking about. He had been working for Daimler for over twenty years developing fuel cells :O We also had laboratory experiments with fuel cells and it was actually quite interesting. The weird thing was that during the whole course we didn’t do almost any calculations, but the main exam was 16 calculation tasks. We also had another exam in the course about different types of renewable energy sources and carriers. I learned a lot about the basics of different types of solar and wind energies etc. This course is maybe more suitable for those who study mechanical engineering or energy technologies, than for wellness technology students like me.

Intercultural communication (5 ECTS): a very interesting course about differences in business culture around the world. Our teacher was from India but had lived in Germany for many years. She had real life experiences from difficulties in communication between many cultures. In this course we had a lot of discussions and the exam was quite easy. Now I understand how a big role the cultural differences and understanding them can have in business life. I also know how to be properly prepared for working in an international environment and making business with people from other cultures.

German history and culture and German language (4+8 ECTS): both courses were obligatory for exchange students, and we weren’t allowed to be away from these courses more than two times during the whole exchange. History and culture was a bit boring with kings, queens, religion and so on. But the teacher was quite interesting so it wasn’t that bad. The exam was also quite easy. The German course was more difficult, eg. everyone had to write a 30 pages long text. We could choose the topic our selves and were allowwed to use pictures, but still! I wrote 25 pages and it was enough. But this course really enhanced my German skills a lot.

Project work for E.Stall (5 ECTS): I was lucky enough to get an ergonomics project for the formula student electric team of HS-Esslingen. I studied on my own about driver ergonomics and different regulations in the racing series and found out some improvements. For instance I found a better racing seat for the car, made some modifications to the frame to get more space for the driver and designed new more ergonomic pedals. My 3D-modelling skills got better during this project both because of making my own CAD-models and because of having access to what everyone else in the team were making and being able to learn from their work.

HS-Esslingen has a lot of really good project work courses and I highly recommend these for everyone who is going there on exchange. I was offered another project work too. It sounded interesting, but I thought it might be too much work fitting two projects into the schedule. It would have been about making some research on printing quality of a new 3D-printer depending on wall thicknesses and used materials.

I had heard before and during my exchange that returning back home can be a big cultural shock. I haven’t experienced any kind of a shock, at least yet. I think German culture is so similar to Finnish culture that it isn’t so hard. Maybe going to Asia on exchange is a bit different when you get used to a completely different way of living and partly forget how things work back home. I’d say the biggest shock so far has been the price of ice cream I had heard that the new sugar tax has had an affect on ice cream and candy prices but I didn’t quite expect it to be this much. But maybe people don’t eat that much unhealthy stuff then, I think it’s ok to have this tax.

This post is getting quite long I think I’ll put some tips for students thinking about going on exchange to Esslingen in a new post.

Wow, I’m flying back to Finland in just two days! There’s pretty much nothing else to do than clean my room and go running now. Many friends have already went back to their homes and others are working all day. I’ll also have a look at some job/internship applications for next summer.

Yesterday I went to the city office to inform them that I’m going back to Finland and to the international office of the university to ask for a signature to my “letter of confirmation”, which is a proof of that I have studied in HS-Esslingen. Then I went to the E.Stall to get a proof of my work in the team and to a computer class to print out our flight tickets back to Finland. After that I ate one of the best meals I’ve eaten at the university restaurant; turkey filet with some fruity sauce.

In the evening Max and Simon came to buy my bikes. Now I have got rid of all three of my bikes here in Esslingen Max had brought beer with him so we had a “last beer in Germany” together too. But I will see them again in two weeks when I come back to Esslingen for the ICP project.

I just ate so much porridge that I’ll have to wait for a while before going out running. So now I’ll have a look at some jobs in Jyväskylä and maybe send a few applications.