Summer I

Summer recess? Not exactly. It is quite common that at American universities, students stay on campus over the summer. They work in research and take a couple of classes which makes upcoming semesters easier to handle.

After finals I only had ten days of freedom before school started again. I visited some friends in New York, saw Beck and Pixies at the Boston Calling festival and at 8 am the following Monday, I was sitting in a lecture hall of Science Center again. Summer semester means that all the study material is compressed into six weeks. Consequently, every lecture covers a week of normal classes and every week is equivalent to one month. I registered for a class in the field of organic chemistry. Every Monday and Wednesday we would synthesize drugs that are commonly available at pharmacies and test their purity. Classes would end around 1 pm and then I would continue in my lab. We are working on non-invasive imaging of action potentials in walking legs of lobsters and in the past year, this project has pushed me out of the biomedical engineering boundaries. Especially, it is crucial to have a good knowledge of optics, signals and electromagnetic interference.

I would work until six or seven in the evening and after dinner there was chemistry homework which made the summer semester equally busy or even busier than normal school year. That’s why unwinding over the weekends was really important. I would always grab my more adventurous friends on a Friday night and we would head away from the cities, cell service or internet. Sometimes, the rain would make us wander away at 4 am so we’d come back to Boston early. Sometimes, it was a struggle for survival in the clouds of brutal and nasty bugs. Sometimes, our area would be surrounded by bears. Our favorite places to go were the woods in western Massachusetts and various parts of the Apalachian trail in New Hampshire or Maine.

The intensity of lectures, drug synthesis, lobster work and weekend adventures caused, that the summer semester went by incredibly fast. And now I’m about to head to Prague for an internship to re-experience European climate and home culture.