This was the first week of my internship at Osaka University’s Photonics Center. I flew into Tokyo on Monday around 3 and I made it to Osaka around midnight. I got to experience sunlight for 48 hours during my travel to Osaka as a result of how time zones and the sun’s rotation work. Once I arrived at my housing, went to bed because I was exhausted from the trip. The next day was the first day of my internship. I was told to arrive for my first day at around 10:30. When I arrived, everyone at the office was having their weekly tea time which they have every Tuesday at 10:30. I had the opportunity to talk to everyone at the center and I also had the opportunity to try a lot of different Japanese snacks. During my first day on the job, I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of the staff and students and learn about their involvement at Osaka University and the surrounding community. Notably I was interested by their yearly program called “child science super light school” where they teach children grades 4-6th about light and photonics through hands on projects. For the remainder of Monday, I was asked to help out with some graphics design work and a meeting was arranged for Tuesday to discuss the project that they planned for me to lead during my time here. On Tuesday I learned that the project I would be leading is The Osaka Photonics Initiative; A project that will enable members of the community to learn about photonics and how it is used in everyday life. It will also give teachers the resources to easily teach photonics concepts to their students through hands on learning projects. To start the process of creating this online resource, there was an initial interview where we discussed the vision and objectives for the initiative. Once the meeting was finished I took the list of objectives and designed a few mock site with these ideas in mind. They included PDF layouts, color schemes and page organization documents. Once these were created, I had another meeting with my supervisors where we decided on which format we wanted to move forward with. After we decided on one I went ahead and started to create the homepage for the website using BootStrap, CSS, HTML and Dreamweaver. My first week was extremely busy but I was able to accomplish a lot.
Glad you got settled in. Remind me: had you been to Japan before this? Adjusting to another culture takes time, and you seem to have made a lot of progress. Make sure you make time to enjoy the surroundings!
This is both my first time being in Japan and my first time out of the country. I was exhausted during the first day of the internship because I had arrived in Japan the night before and because I was jet lagged from the flight. But I had a lot of energy since I’m excited to be here so it didn’t end up being a problem. The cultural differences have been a major learning experience for me. I’ve been studying the Japanese language for a few years so at least I’m able to communicate okay.