Hurling and International Feast!

ALRIGHTY so a few exciting things have been happening in Cork, Ireland this week. First off, our house is now complete with all the engineering students from different areas participating in this Tyndall internship. Everyone has bonded pretty quickly and it already feels like we have formed a temporary summer family with dinners at night and trips around town. There are 2 Irish guys, one from Dublin and one from Wexford, as well as a student from Kazakhstan. There are a total of 5 American students now--the three of us from Notre Dame and two others from the University of California Santa Barbara.
Last Sunday we went to a hurling match which was a physical, fast-paced, and high scoring game---the perfect combination for an exciting sport! The weather even held up with some sun and warm weather. It was a very pleasant Sunday afternoon. The game was in a 50,000 person stadium and it was packed with passionate fans of Cork (red and navy blue) vs. Tipperary (royal blue and yellow) in the Semi-Final game of the Munster Championship. The neat thing about Hurling is that you can only play for the county team that you grew up in so a lot of the town knows the players personally and they are truly playing for their home. The loyalty and camaraderie of the system only added to the atmosphere of waving county flags and wholehearted singing of fight songs.

 Second (and most definitely my favorite) was an International Potluck Dinner between the 20 international students in the complex I'm living in. The menu included a mouth-watering-Thanksgiving-worthy buffet of the following dishes:
Italian pizza and gnocci                                
French crepes
Spanish tortillas          
Polish potato cakes         
Kazakhstan soup
Irish shepherds pie, potatoes, coffee, black pudding and sausages
Hawaiian sushi, American hot dogs, Southern sweet potato casserole, California quesadillas, and Apple pie

the Irish man and his potatoes

we assumed this position for about an hour just trying everything!

Hawaiian sushi---you would have loved it Logan

the focused look of a French chef making crepes

our lovely Italian friends

 And believe me, I was hurting after because I had at least two of everything! 




Oh and I suppose there's this thing called work that consumes most of the week days. The internship has been going well and I'm learning a good bit. At this point I'm looking at data from babies in the NICU who had seizures and were administered drugs for those seizures. Because the neurotransmitters in a baby's brain are changing their function rapidly so that they have different affects over the course of a 24-hour period, administering different drugs at different times to stop the seizures is a relatively imprecise and blind practice at the moment. The long-term goal of the research group is to create a software program that will be able to not only indicate when a seizure is occurring, but also alert the doctor to when the best time for administering a drug is. So that information has been of interest to me more than the past couple of weeks that were more engineer-heavy.


Today as part of the internship program we took a tour of the photonics fabrication lab at Tyndall. This is pretty much an accurate portrayal of how we looked for a few hours:

Despite the incredible attractiveness of these outfits, I think I fancy more of a scrubs kind of lifestyle. But that knowledge in itself has made this experience a wonderful one because I now know for sure clinical medicine rather than lab research is what I want to do with my interest in science. I'm still enjoying the work side and once again it's amazing how connected engineering and medicine is these days...countless projects going on at the moment to improve the accuracy of healthcare tools and diagnostics...it's incredible.






Next up for my summer agenda is visiting Morgan in Italy next weekend and then a trip to Paris and Bordeaux the weekend after that. I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer!