Tot ziens Leuven, en bedankt! (Goodbye Leuven, and thank you !) - Sharada Narayanan

To conclude our summer internship, we all gave our final presentations on Friday. I was able to describe the importance of my work, the development of my chip injection and sample preparation protocol, and recommend an optimal interpillar distance for the chip design. I also discussed my latest experiments testing chip cavity coatings, but those results were less conclusive. I really wish I had more time to properly study and improve the adherence and longevity of the different chip coatings I was working with. I’m planning on running one more experiment that might clear some things up, but I think the best thing I’ve done with regards to the coating optimization is to leave this research on a good trajectory for someone else to pick up after I leave.

Legend has it that if you drink the water
from the duck fountain and
stroke its back, you’ll return to Leuven

At imec, the subject of politics emerges often during our daily coffee breaks with the interns and our Belgian colleagues. It’s an interesting position to be in another country trying to explain the political climate in the United States and learn about the conversations and issues dominating Belgium and the EU. Globalization is an interesting phenomenon because it brings us together, reminding each other of our shared humanity, but it also highlights the extraordinary benefits of the collaboration of different perspectives and approaches to problem-solving. Despite the never-ending political animosities and wars that dominate the news, it’s heartwarming to see the continued collaborations between scientists and engineers across the globe. Science, perhaps more than anything else, must be able to transcend these arbitrary boundaries because the challenges we are facing are too large and existential to fight divided.

What’s been personally rewarding about my first experience working abroad is that I feel like the world has opened up to me. Before this program, I never considered the possibility of working outside the US after I graduate. But at imec, I met so many people from all over the world and I never felt lost, unwelcome, or inferior for being an outsider. I am definitely going to do some research into job opportunities abroad when I return to Hopkins and I am excited to see what the future holds for me.

In the sprit of cultural unity, this weekend us interns and some local friends spent an afternoon at the Hoge Kempen National Park and had one last night of fun with the Belgians at a food festival in the center of Leuven, sampling street food from cuisines all over the world. Since I arrived more than two months ago, I have been so grateful that this internship program placed us in Leuven; a small, vibrant college town surrounded by farmland, and I will remember this summer and this city forever.

The interns and Luke, INBT's Director of Corporate Partnerships who helps facilitate the IRES internship program, meeting up for dinner after our final
presentations.