Minneapolis 2010

Hosting the ZHAW Summer 2010 design teams was a real delight. All teams put in a tremendous effort. I was truly impressed with your dedication to the project. The results were creative and substantive. We will put them to very good use in building the new, improved NOvA factory machines!

I really enjoyed my time with all of you. I felt like I made 24 new friends (in addition to re-activating my old friendship with Armin). I had a great time talking with you all at the social events. Please look me up if anything brings you back to Minnesota!

Today was our last whole day in New York City. In the morning we visited the Brooklyn Bridge and in the afternoon we made a trip to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum.

And finally we celebrated our last evening with music and some dancing in a club called Webster hall.

Day 4 in the hot and humid Big Apple. Time to keep on exploring the pulsating city, and, for some of us, time to get the laundry done at a Chinese dry cleaner. The elderly woman’s English skills weren’t much better than ours: «What’s your name, sir?» – «Hertz, like the rental cars.» – «Okay Mr. Cars, you can pick-up the clothes tomorrow at 5.»
Then we decided to go to the Brooklyn Bridge, but a rain shower made us change our plans. So we did some indoor sightseeing (shopping at B+H Electronics & Macy’s). Later in the afternoon, more rain also killed our afternoon plan to visit the Rockefeller Centre. Instead at the M&M’s store at Time Square the colourful chocolate-nut balls welcomed us, and later in the evening, around 20 shrimps found their way to our plates at Bubba Gump’s Shrimps & Co.
To end the day, we decided to check if the Clubs and Bars in Christian’s 10 years old pocket guide were still around.

A look at the sky announced that the weather today would be bad. Heavy clouds had turned the sunny weather of yesterday into heavy rain today. We decided to spend this day shopping, but only to get some breakfast we were already soaked despite umbrellas.








The Mall of Manhattan was smaller than we thought, but big enough for shopping. At the evening we ate burgers at “HB”. Afterwards we checked out some bars to drink a beer and have fun!

On our first day in the Big Apple we leave early in the morning to discover the city. First we go to the museum of modern art, but it opens only at ten. So we buy a subway ticket and head for the Staten Island Ferry.








Afterwards we visit Ground Zero and Wall Street! Lunch we take in Little Italy. As you can see, New York is like the whole world on a small island. All is huge and very different. We will enjoy our 4 days left…

Most of us woke up really tired early on Sunday morning. We hadn’t slept more than three hours the last night. Soon our luggage was packed and flowed over with stuff from the Mall of America.
A coach drove us to the airport. Luckily we all had our luggage and even our passports with us, so we were ready to take off to the city which never sleeps. Goodbye Minneapolis, it was a great time!

After a three hour flight and an hour long trip from the airport to the middle of Manhattan we arrived in the Edison Hotel in New York and were impressed because of the beautiful view through our window.
We are all very excited to explore the Big Apple.

After having returned at 3 am from Sneaky Pete's, we haven't had much sleep until we started for today's trip to the Mall of America. We spent the whole afternoon exploring the 520 stores.
Although we had a lot of fun in the mall we were very looking forward to the dinner this evening. At half past five we gathered at the Coffman Memorial Building. There we had some time exchanging some stories about the evening before (pics might get a PG rating though…). The food was delicious and Adam, Tom and Armin said very moving things about the last two weeks we spent at the UofM - indeed the last 12 days were quite a positive experience! We gladly received our certificates and most of us continued the party at Sally's - special thanks to Crystal who told us about this location!
Speaking of which: thank you Crystal for your patience during the last two weeks – we know it was a challenge but you did very well!

After two weeks of hard work today was the «day of truth» as we say in German: we had the opportunity to present our results.
In the morning we had the last possibility to finish and practice our presentations. In the afternoon all teams presented their designs.








The first three teams presented their fly cutting machines and teams four and five their strining devices. Every team had about 20 minutes time to explain the qualities of their solution in front of the class, Prof. Tom Chase and the Swiss staff and two responsible persons of the Nova factory. We felt that everyone really was excited about their work.
The presentations went all well. And as a conclusion we can say, that we learned much about product development and also working in an interdisciplinary team was very instructive.

Satisfied we went out at night to celebrate our accomplished mission.

Today Thursday is the last day we can work on our projects before the presentations tomorrow. Therefore all the teams put all their drawings and CAD models together and finished their documentations. Working on the CAD Station was very comfortable, because of the deluxe 30" screens we could use.
Unfortunately, there were no other events or special happenings today, so it was just a usual working day.

Today was a pretty eventful day. After a short night followed early in the morning by Prof. Chase's presentation workshop, we continued working on our projects. Before noon we were informed, that in our regular classroom the soccer semifinal between Germany and Spain was going to be watched the same time we were supposed to be having a lecture on Minnesota. Of course we had nothing against it. But in the end, we were told that our lecture had been moved to another room. It was an interesting presentation of Minnesota's politics in the last century with an emphasis on certain contemporary individuals. However after this lecture, almost everybody rushed to our actual classroom to watch the second half of the soccer game.

In the evening we were invited to Susan Kubitschek's house for a BBQ party. Unfortunately it rained in the afternoon and it didn't clear up until we left. We were picked up by a coach at Yudof Hall and transported to Susan's home with surprisingly little trouble. When we reached our destination, even the sun was shining and we spent a great evening with Susan and her family. Amongst other things, we were offered a delicious dinner, three different beer brands and the possibility to play tabletop soccer - the evening couldn't have been better! Sadly, it came to an end too early and after nine o'clock, we were already on our way back to Yudof Hall.

After our awesome weekend up north, we are now back to work at the campus in Minneapolis. We had to get up early – as usual on an ordinary working day – to get to the lecture of Tom on time.



Afterwards we had almost the rest of the day to work on our design projects. Outside the weather is beautiful, the sun is shining and we are sitting in an air-conditioned room with 70°F working hard to reach our project goals.
To compensate from the stress of the day, we went downtown in the evening to some pubs to drink a beer and sing karaoke. All in all it was a good day today and we are already beginning to look forward to our trip to New York.

After a beautiful weekend in the north, we got on the vans, to take us back to the university. The bus ride gave us the opportunity to discuss the weekend again and look at photos and videos.


We stopped at a very nice viewpoint above Duluth, the largest city in the north of Minnesota to relax and take some pictures.
A long drive on freeways with lots of holiday traffic and heavy rain at times brought us back to Yudof Hall on the campus. Happy but tired, most of us relaxed and afterwards started to work again on our designs.

Independence Day started with pancakes and lots of rain. A perfect start for the planned canoeing trip on the Boundary Waters! But as we all know, the Swiss are weatherproof. So we put on our swimsuits and raincoats and headed for one of the 10’000 lakes of Minnesota.

It was a quite adventurous canoeing-tour over three different lakes which were connected by small footpaths, so called «portages», where we had to carry the canoes on our shoulders. After eating lunch on open/under running water and a short swimming lap, the sun was finally persuaded to appear for a while.

In the evening we were all very excited to experience the American Independence Day festival, with hundreds of flags and lots of patriotism we thought. But we were a bit disappointed as we found ourselves in a small town called Grand Marais where just a small fireworks took place with some live country music and everyone rushed home at eleven o’clock as soon as the firework was over. Well, so did we...

On the second day at the «North Shore» of Lake Superior we visited the MINOS (Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Research) Neutrino Detector, which is placed at the bottom of a former iron ore mine in the small town of Soudan in North Minnesota.


We had to ride about half a mile down the mine shaft in the old cages to get to the bottom of the mine which is about a quarter mile below sea level. During two guided tours we got an impression first on how huge the Laboratory is, where the physicists do the research on Neutrinos.

The second «historic» tour showed us through the original mine. A guide explained to us how hard work and life must have been for the miners in «The Cadillac of the Mines» as it was called due to its iron ore quality. We were all glad to have brought jackets since it was quite cold underground.
We finished the day with an excellent dinner at a restaurant on the shore of Lake Superior.