When I went for the E-Camp in the middle of September, Cheng and I had already moved out from our apartment in Aachen… Goodbye Aachen, Goodbye Germany!
After stocking a lot of my things which I wouldn’t need too soon at my parents’ homes, I was still left with a lot of things I thought I would be using soon. So I packed as many things as I could possibly fit into my car and headed straight to Eggelsberg, Austria!
…Or not, my first stop was actually in Nürnberg where I visited Max with whom I enjoyed a “Schäufele” and 2 or 3 beers with almost summer-like weather! A very pleasent last weekend after 2 months without work. 🙂
13.09.2015: Austria, here I come!
The next day I was the first participant of our E-Camp to arrive at the hotel and after I just finished carrying all of my boxes etc. to my room. I heard someone moving on the floor. The first new colleague I should meet: Matus!
Beginning of E-Camp: The next day we should finally all gather and start slowly with an introduction round and some general information. Our group was really international, 14 participants from 9 countries!
Basic Training: In the following months we have learned a lot together, and even though our group was very mixed in age -starting from 20 and me (30) being the second oldest- I can honestly say that we made a good team. Everyone was helpful and we supported each other learning all the different E-Camp topics.
During the basic training we still had enough free time to explore our new surroundings together and had a lot of fun doing so.
Labworks: And finally all of us had to prove ourselves by completing the labworks, which were composed of five 6-day projects. During this period of the E-Camp all of us were extremely busy trying to finish our projects, but we still managed to have at least some common free time during the weekends, and did a skiing trip in mid-January.
Amongs the projects were a CNC project, a 3-axes delta robot project, more motion control topics, a PID control project, general logic control, and visualization work for all of them. It was a lot of work, but also rewarding when the machines finally behaved as you wanted after hours of coding!
All in all it was a great time during which we did not only learn a lot and got prepared for the job, but also had the chance to connect with our new colleagues and had a lot of fun experiences together!