First days of work

Started my job on Tuesday and I am liking it so far. On my first day I met my boss, Judith, who is a Ph.D. student working at/with HafenCity University (HCU). Here is picture of where HCU will be when its all completed:

It looks pretty lame now but in a couple of years its suppose to be done. They also said it was going to be done in 2012 when they started so who knows when it will be completed... But this year Hamburg was titled the European Green Capital! I don't know about you, but I was pretty impressed. I got some information about tours they do to show why they got this so I will definitely be doing that!

Back to business: Judith also advises students and does lectures for some classes. She is nice and really helpful with getting settled here and starting work. In the afternoon on Tuesday we tried to get some errands done but were completely unsuccessful. We started at the post office so I could register in Hamburg and she needed to get a new passport. We got there and received the number 215 and 216 while they were on #176. So we sat down and filled out some paperwork. After a while we were told by a woman sitting by us that she had already been there for 2 hours and still had about 20 people ahead of her. We thought we could go to the bank and try to open an account but once we got there we were told I needed to be registered in Hamburg to open an account. So back to the post office we went...only to find out there were still about 25 people ahead of us. We declared Tuesday a bust and went our separate ways home.

On Wednesday I sat in on some presentation that students were giving that Judith had to evaluate. They were all in German but I was just interested to sit in because the students were about my age and I wanted to see what type of work they were doing. After that we went back to the office and celebrated Judith's boss's birthday that was last week. Here, if it is your birthday, you supply champagne and I think usually some type of food. So I got to have some champagne at lunch!! I was pretty stoked but didn't want to seem like a totally newbie so I contained my excitement. After lunch I actually got to start working! Judith explained to me what her dissertation is about and what type of research she is looking at. Right now I am reading articles about spatial strategic planning. It is some cool stuff and it actually makes sense to me. I'm definitely improving my reading of articles skills and boy did they need some work!! I have never been good at that kind of reading and I definitely think this will help.

Today was more reading and summarizing of the articles. I finally made an appointment to get registered so hopefully I can open a bank account soon. HafenCity University seems like an amazing school! They have different levels of degrees in Urban Planning, Urban Design, Civil Engineering, Architectural Engineering, and (my favorite) REAP, which stands for Resource Efficiency in Architecture and Planning (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

That is basically what I want to do which I have never been able to put a title on. I am really excited to be working at this school and Judith said she can help me set up some meetings with people if I want. I will probably do this I just have to get my mind straight about who I would want to talk to first!!

Until next time:

Keep it green,
Brianne