A Bittersweet Goodbye

Posted on by Ben Zaltsman

4 weeks after leaving home for the faraway foreign land of Gothenburg I left the now familiar faraway land of Gothenburg for the next destination of my summer travels, Israel.

Now, one week later, it’s time to look back and reflect on my time in Gothenburg. It was quite surreal when the program came to an end. While each day of the trip felt long because of the 9-12 hours of work of a day, the overall trip felt very short.

Let us start with what I felt were the shortcomings of both the courses and myself. First, ENGI 355. I had some knowledge of Fusion 360 coming in (from ENGI 210) so I was excited to build upon that knowledge. Although I found that it was not particularly helpful at first I was excited about the CAM  lesson so that I could build on those skills. So when that lesson was cut from the curriculum I was disappointed but I understand the need for it. I instead of knowledge deeper knowledge on everything else and Dr. Wettergreen offered to teach us that material during the fall semester as a workshop (which I plan on doing). Obviously waking up each morning very early was tough but when you combine 2 15-week courses into a single month then the days are bound to be long. My main (and only real) complaint is the disorganization of the program. Coming in no one really knew what to expect so finding out that we would not just be prototyping but working on-site was really exciting. However, finding out that we would miss the final week was upsetting and when it came time to leave with the project not done. I think knowing what I was getting into would have made me much more comfortable (I would’ve brought Claritin, work shirts, and bug spray) both physically and mentally. My personal shortcomings are that I’m not really sure I followed the EDP as closely as I would in the OEDK due to the lack of constant supervision and the time crunch. So it felt as if I was not always making the optimal decision and sometimes like we were just winging it.

Using winging it as a transition, let’s discuss the successes of the programs. I think the main one was the realness of ENGI 200. Students tend to be a little coddled in the classroom. Everyone is looking over your shoulder and helping you all of the time. But in this project, failure was not only a concept but also a very real possibility. The fear was very real and I think the possibility of failure really pressed us to be great. I also now think the knowledge I gained from ENGI 355 will allow me to fill in the gaps from the CAM lesson on my own. I think there are two other portions that were incredible. The leadership roles and interdisciplinary collaboration.

Working as the project manager was a really great experience. Gravel came in on my day unexpectedly and it was a blessing in disguise. Having to work so impromptu was a growing experience. I also think I took to the role quite naturally and although there was not any major conflict (which I’m not saying I would have liked but it would have also been a great growth opportunity) I still think I worked everything out quickly and well. The system of gravel movement that I had established stayed until the very end of the project.

Interdisciplinary collaboration had a tendency to frustrate me. This was well known by the rest of the Rice students. The architects had really creative ideas but a lot of the time they were not reasonable from an engineering perspective. The real kicker was the stakeholder representative, who would come in every few days and tell us to completely change our design. I think again this was a positive, as she prepared me to have a boss or an actual client who would come in every so often and change everything I worked on and it would be a 1 step forward, 2 steps back situation. I found I could use knowledge from my previous designs to help in the current ones. Especially from the creative aspect where I felt that I struggled.

To summarise, this experience on it’s own would have been fantastic. But once you take into account the friends that I made, from the summer workers to the Chalmerists to the Rice students and the oppurtunity to spend a month abroad learning about another culture and everything that comes with that. This experience was nothing short of a major point in my life so far.

Signing off one last time,

Ben

P.S. 66% done with the EDES minor! Let’s go!

Bye Bye Sweden

Posted on by Ben Zaltsman

My final week in Sweden was fairly uneventful in terms of nonwork life. We returned to work on Monday morning. Right away we got to work, that day I was the safety and efficiency officer. Unfortunately, we had 3 separate injuries (one of them being me). We moved on past that though. The mushroom path made a decent amount of progress that day. That evening we had our first CAD lesson, rendering. I found the material simple enough and the lesson was over pretty quickly.

Tuesday was slightly more eventful because I got to actually work on the path. We worked all day long.  Then that evening was our second CAD lesson; drawings. I found this slightly less intuitive but also fairly simple and I caught on pretty quickly. That evening I made my presentation for Thursday.

Wednesday was another day of just working all day. That evening I practiced my presentation for the next morning.

Thursday morning we presented. I had a very stressful job of being the GoPro guy. It did not work for Christian’s presentation (the first one). It was taking a time lapse instead. So I recorded it on my phone. Then the next 5 presentations worked perfectly. Until mine, halfway through it decided to stop working. Luckily Yufei saved me and recorded it all. That day I was also on fika duty. It was me, Sara and Khuloud. The 3 middle easterners. Naturally, we decided to make falafel for everyone. We had two simple fikas, just cookies and apples. But for lunch, we made falafel and salads as well as our own specialties. An Iranian drink, a Syrian salad, and Israeli fried eggplant. I think it was pretty popular.

That afternoon we went to the lake and played a Swedish game were you have to knock over sticks. It was a good time even if we met a woman who acted very inappropriately.

On the final day of work we just pushed all day long. We parted from our summer workers right before lunch. Then the entire afternoon felt like the last lap music from Mario Kart. It was very intense as everyone tried to finish as much as they could before the Rice students left. We got a decent chunk done in the mushrooms but obviously, I wish we would’ve gotten more done. I then parted from all the Chalmer’s students and headed back to the hostel.

That evening we went out to Skottskogen one last time. We played four square where Kung was crowned champion of Sweden, Texas and the world. A few hours later I flew to Paris. Then to Tel Aviv.

A final reflection of my time in Sweden will come soon. But for now, enjoy the photo dump.

Goteborg or… Copenhagen?

Posted on by Ben Zaltsman

This week was very eventful. Monday and Tuesday however, were not. We mostly just worked on constructing our design, solving issues as we go. Wednesday was special for me because I was assigned to be project manager which was definitely an interesting experience. I basically had full reign of what the whole team did on that specific day. So when we got a surprise shipment of gravel you could imagine my confusion and shock. Luckily I worked it out and thanks to everyone’s hard work it was mostly dealt with on the same day. I found certain strategies of leading were more efficient. For example, giving individuals tasks. So instead of saying ‘x’ many people need to do task ‘a’ you say persons 1,2, and 3 are doing task ‘a’. I also found that if I concentrated the woefully unproductive people on one team the overall production increased. This was because rather than having 5 groups producing at 75% we had 4 produce at 100% and 1 barely produce anything. But the ultimate strategy was putting someone very productive in that last group and that absolutely worked and we produced so much.

Thursday was back to uneventful. Continuing on working on our design construction. We laid gravel on our path and began to lay logs.

Friday was midsommar which I mostly used to rest but Friday night we tried to experience some of the festivities but found that we were too young to go into anything. Instead, Daniel and I took a late night scooter tour of the city where we saw the city from really high. Because we went to Copenhagen the next day I believe this was the single longest day of my life.

The next morning we left for Copenhagen on the bus. We arrived around 1 pm. We ate and checked into our hostel. Then we went out to see the Christiania district. We split there as Daniel, Scott, and myself walked around for a bit longer than the rest of the group. While we were hanging out in a mini-park area a man named Peter came up to us. He gave me the single most surreal experience of my life. He came up to us, said he was going to play us some blues, played rock instead. Told us the story of the real Lynyrd Skynyrd. Then he told us about how wack materialism is and how violence is bad. And just like he came he was gone.

We had dinner at this shipyard. It was a load of food trucks. They were all shipment containers. I had a burrito and a really weird vibe.

That night we hit the town. We went around to a few different places to see what is up where. Eventually, we called it a night and went to bed.

The next morning we woke up and went to the Rosenborg castle after brunch. The castle was nice enough but we decided to just absorb it from the outside. Then we went to the Staten Memorial Museum. It had NOTHING to do with Staten Island. It was an art museum. There were some really interesting pieces, The Fall of the Titans and the Flaying of Marsyas. Then we hit the botanical gardens and after that it was already time to leave Copenhagen. As usual, enjoy the photo dump.

Woah, We’re Halfway There…

Posted on by Ben Zaltsman

This week began really early. We woke up very early so that we could take the almost hour-long tram ride over to Chalmers @ Hammerkullen. The “campus” is really just a floor on a building but it’s nice. On the first day, we took the time to get to know one another and to get to know the project. I got assigned the (best) group, the mushrooms. I have the smallest group, one of me, two summer workers, and two Chalmers students, one architecture and one engineering master’s, Marie and Sagar. We right away got to work designing, with Ann-Sofie and Salam. We came up with a general idea of what we wanted to do. We also mapped out our main goals.

We spent Tuesday and Wednesday perfecting our design. Until Wednesday afternoon when our stakeholder representatives threw us a curveball and told us to basically redo the whole thing. Which was frustrating, to say the least. But we did it anyway. We grind-ed out and redid the whole thing. Then Thursday we spent the morning doing some final work and then the afternoon setting up the whole site. We had to set up fencing all around which took us a long while and then Sagar and I mapped out the path and came up with an addition which I am really happy with. We found a circle of mushroom stumps so we’re gonna invite people to explore over there.

Our final design is a packed dirt-gravel path that will weave through trees, then there is a wooden bridge into the wilderness circle. Off the sides of this path, there are hand posts that are staked into the ground with rope and can be used as rests for elderly or disabled people. Then also along the path are stackable mushrooms that are interconnected with the same rope that is used for the handposts. Basically, the bottom portion of the mushroom is fixed but the top portion is similar to lego so you can twist it around and move it around to make your own mushroom shape. I think it’s a nice idea and we’ll see how it ends up functioning.

Friday was spent doing the grunt work for the final schedule, making a Gantt chart, making drawings, ordering materials. We split up to get it all done and we did at the last second.

Friday night some of us hung out at the hostel but we didn’t really do anything. Then the next day all of us hopped on the tram and went to the archipelago. which was really cool. I found it reminiscent of Mackinac Island in Michigan. But this was much cooler. We also hopped into the water off some really high diving boards. Hurt my ears a lot and the water was freezing cold but I’m glad I did it. We also just walked around and saw all the rock formations as we walked along the pseudo shore. I’m fairly certain we were trespassing for like eighty percent of the trip but we didn’t get in trouble so no harm, no foul.

Sunday I spent the whole day either eating, grocery shopping or working on the ENGI 355 midterm. Here’s my photo dump for the week. (The ice cream is passionfruit flavored with fresh passionfruit on top).

1 Down, 3 To Go…

Posted on by Ben Zaltsman

So it has been 8 days since my arrival in Sweden. My flight in was fairly unremarkable so we’ll just fast forward to Saturday, once I arrived. That first afternoon I spent getting settled into our (fairly small) hostel room. I figured out if I set out the clothes rack over my suitcase I could basically double my storage space so it all worked out. Then that evening we went out for dinner right by the hostel. The food was pretty good so that was a definite plus. We spent this evening getting to know one another, I was already friends with Megha and Daniel because we were on the same ENGI 120 team and share a home college, respectively. I knew Kung from our LPAP and this was my first time meeting Christian, Yufei and Scott. I know Christian and Scott knew one another but I think that’s everyone that knew one another beforehand.

Then we had a free day Sunday right up until the evening. I spent that day and afternoon getting oriented and getting food for my room and to make my packed lunches. Then in the evening, the University paid for us to have a really nice dinner at this rooftop restaurant. The food then put the food from the night before to shame. It was simply incredible.

Then Monday we started ENGI 355. I was not especially nervous because the class assumed we had no CAD/Fusion 360 experience and I had some from ENGI 210.  We spent much of the day learning the basics on TinkerCad. Then I learned about my new favorite thing, fikas. Basically, in the middle of the day, it’s Swedish custom to take a quick break to increase productivity. I think if it’s done correctly it can be super helpful but I don’t think we really got the hang of it until Friday.

The next few days all followed the same recipe. Wake up around 8, make myself lunch, stop by the store on the way to the tram to grab a yogurt drink and possibly a pastry for dessert after lunch. Hop on the 8:39 6 tram and head on over to Chalmers. Then be at Chalmers until around 6, at which point we would either tram or scooter back to the hostel.

But Thursday was a national holiday so we had a 3 hour day. We spent the afternoon wandering the city. First, we went to the park and watched a concert and went up to the zoo which was nice, they had lots of hooved animals but not much else. Then we all hopped on scooters and zoomed down to Haga, a neighborhood that has lots of cafes. After we had a snack at Haga cafe we went to the mall. All 7 of us split up to find scooters and then by some miracle we all made it to the mall. All of us found a different entrance but it worked out. We had dinner at some sushi place by it and then headed back to the hostel.

Friday was a standard weekday, although we played soccer in the evening. Then I spent most of Saturday working on my homework assignments and just generally resting.

Sunday we went to the largest amusement park in Scandinavia, Liseberg. It’s really cheap (485 SEK) and it was a lot of fun. Scott and I decided to scooter back from there once we left, and after a 20-minute scooter ride the cost was like 40 SEK (so cheap!). I spent the evening working some more and resting.

Despite my mother’s instruction I have failed to take pictures. But I will start to take some now — both for her and for you, my dear readers.

Catch ya next week,

Ben