Munich Week 1 + Residenz and Schloss Nymphenburg

BMW "4 Cylinders" headquarters, and BMW Museum

BMW Welt (BMW World)

I started my first day of work on Monday.  As soon as I looked out the window, my jaw dropped.  It was pouring rain and I realized that I had forgotten to bring an umbrella with me to Germany.  I met Corey in the lobby and we headed to our first day of work soaked.  I had a rain jacket on, but my pants were soaked all the way through top to bottom.  Once we got there, we went to the receptionist and checked in.  Soon our boss Luc Cremers met us in the lobby, greeted us and showed us around a little.

He took us into the central area of the building and me and Corey were blown away.  It’s a huge circular room that goes several floors up with glass windows all the way up.  Here there’s a café area where daily you find hundreds of employees enjoying a cup of coffee for breakfast with coworkers.  There’s also a BMW merchandise store, a dealership where you can buy a car, and in an adjacent building a small grocery store.

Herr Cremers introduced us to everyone in the Struktur Dynamik und Vibration department.  Everyone seemed extremely nice and friendly.  We then went immediately to get our BMW badges, where the lady seeing my personal information wished me an early birthday.  She was kind of like a drill sergeant getting all the new employees through the line, but she gave me a smile and a birthday wish which was very pleasant. 

After that, Herr Cremers told us we needed to get our work contract.  We had to go to a different building to do that, so we did but when we got there, they told us we needed to have a residence permit first.  Only problem with that was that the Finanzamt in München closed at noon, so we had to wait until Tuesday.  Instead we decided we would go to sign our Apartment Contract and get that out of the way.  Then we went back to work and Herr Cremers introduced us to the people in the lab we would be working in.  Once again everyone was extremely nice and very welcoming.  With all the joking we could tell it was going to be fun to work here.

Tuesday was my birthday which turned out to be legal documentation day!  It was a looooong day from 7:30AM to 4:30PM straight of going from place to place signing paper work.  I was completely exhausted by the end of it, but the awesome thing about doing all this on my birthday was that I got around 4 or 5 happy birthday wishes from people processing my documents, since they had to fill out my birth date.  Overall we got our City of Munich Registration, our Residence Permit, our Tax Card, and our Work Contract all completed.  The only thing left at the end of the day was to set up our bank accounts.  After all that was completed, Corey very nicely treated me to pizza and a beer at a local pizza restaurant.  It was delicious and I was very grateful to him for taking me out. 

Wednesday we worked with a  guy named Fritz (a nickname for Friedrich) doing Photogramatry on a prototype vehicle.  The way this works is by placing dots and markers all around the car and taking pictures everywhere around the car with a high definition camera.  These pictures are uploaded into a program that can piece all of these dots together and recreate the skeleton of the vehicle.  Once you’re done, that becomes your static case from which you can measure displacement of the dots once forces are applied.  The displacements allow you to measure with high precision the effects of design changes on the prototype car.  It’s cutting edge stuff and is really cool to learn about and work with.  After work I did some shopping, buying myself a much needed coffee maker and also some groceries.

Wow 2 story KFC!

Thursday we didn’t really do much except socialize.  So far our day has mostly consisted of chatting and getting to know our coworkers better.  It’s also been great for practicing our German language skills.  Most of the time we converse in German, but occasionally speak English when we don’t know how to explain it in German.  Some differences in the work day I’ve noticed so far:

1.       Meals seem to be higher priority here than in the United States.  The multiple cafés are completely flooded with people in the morning drinking coffee together and small bites to eat.  For lunch, we usually take an hour and then have about 15 minutes of coffee time after that.  Also on Friday mornings we have a traditional Bavarian breakfast called Brotzeit, where people eat Weisswurst, Pretzels, and beer.  Yes, beer for breakfast.  Additionally, if you happened to forget your beer, you can conveniently buy yourself a beer at the BMW food store on the campus.

2.       The work week consists of only 35 hours, meaning an average of 7 hours per day.  That means 7 hours of being there, not necessarily being productive.  So far people in the lab are extremely social and I don’t really see people getting a whole lot of actual work done.  But I think that’s because it’s a bit of a down time.  I’ve heard it will pick up later, so we’ll see what happens.

3.       Everything is very loose and informal.  Everyone in the lab uses the informal word for you “du” instead of “Sie”.  The days and times we have to work are extremely flexible.  We can take days off to travel if we want to, we just have to let at least one person know in advance.  We have flex time too where we can work less or more and make it up on other days and also shift around the times during the day we arrive and leave.  It’s all very relaxed and based on the honors system.

Thursday after work almost everyone in the department went out to a huge Paulaner beer garden, where they were serving a special brew of Paulaner Salvator for the lent season.  We drank beer, ate pretzels, and had a great time chatting around a wooden table outside from around 6pm to almost midnight.

Friday we worked with our mentor Jan Thielsen.  He showed us how to run acoustic tests on a car by measuring the frequency responses of force excitations on various points around the car.  We learned how to set up the equipment on the car, about the logic of the cables and signals, and are slowly learning how to use the program that processes the signals.

München Residenz
Saturday I decided to visit the Residenz, which is the former royal palace of the Bavarian monarchs of the city of Munich. It’s the largest city palace in Germany and is today open to visitors for its architecture and room decorations, and displays from the former royal collections.  The complex of buildings contains ten courtyards and the museum displays 130 rooms.  It was about an hour and a half walk there, but it was totally worth it since the weather was so nice.  I also got to visit the Treasury where they store a collection of holy relics and also the private theater of the estate.

Schloss Nymphenburg

Sunday I decided to visit the Schloss Nymphenburg, which was the main summer residence of Bavarian kings and rulers.  I also got to see the horse-drawn carriage museum and porcelain museum there.  This again was about an hour and a half walk which turned into 2 hours since I got lost, but again totally worth it because the weather was even more wonderful than yesterday.  After touring the palace itself I wandered around the palace grounds a bit and found a place by a pond to sit and read for the rest of the afternoon.