I Become an Engineer and Good-bye Paris (for Now)

Now that I’ve finished my internship, I can give more of an oveview of what exactly I was doing here. Oddly enough, I spent the past six weeks at the École des Pont Paris Tech or the Parisian School of Bridges. I am a decidedly humanities person—a history major, who has never taken physics in her life. The idea of spending six weeks at an engineering school caused me a great deal of misery when I first found out about my placement. If I was going to go all the way to France, couldn’t I at least do something related to history?

In the end, my internship wasn’t as dreadful as I had imagined. My work consisted mainly of translating and editing. During the first two weeks, my boss had an article that he needed to translate into English immediately and I got to work directly with him on it. His English is pretty good and he of course knows the translation for the technical terms such as “bulk damage parameter” or “creep test.” I was able to help because I had a better sense of the sentence structure and could make sure that the phrasing wasn’t awkward. In the second half of my internship, I mainly read over articles and corrected the English. Some of the authors took what I had done and changed it on their own, but with others, I went through and explained why I had made the suggestions or changes I did.

The topics of the articles I worked on generally dealt with civil engineering. The article I worked on the longest was about finding parameters for the deterioration of glue that was used to adhere two metal blocks. Another article I spent a long time on was about calculating ridges. Yet another sought to model the oscillations produced by a pedestrian and the effect of multiple pedestrians on a structure such as a bridge or a stadium. Garnet, I think you would have actually been able to make sense out of these articles, but for me, they were just terms and equations,

The post docs at the school were the saving grace of my job. I would eat lunch with them every day and since most of them didn’t speak English that well, I would have to speak French. Indeed, I responded to them in French when they attempted to practice their English with me. They were all very friendly and welcoming even though I was a good five or six years younger. At the beginning, I would sit and listen to their conversations, but by the end, I could follow without an extreme effort and even participate.

Although four or five of the people I hung out with were French, the majority of them came from other countries, in particular North Africa, the Middle East, Vietnam, and China. Due to the wide range of cultural experiences, the post-lunch coffee discussions often centered on differences of religion, what it means to be veiled, and hunting in different countries. Among other things, I learned that the Algerian president has never married, has remained faithful to his aged mother, and was elected by 90% of the population. I also found that in Iran, it’s very hard for a single woman to rent an apartment, but it’s quite commonplace in Algeria. Furthermore, when you go hunting, you must wait a day before eating the animals you’ve killed.

I think that I did gain some important skills from my job. I learned how to correct texts that have been translated from French and what kinds of errors to look for. My French undoubtedly got better (I now know how to say pomegranate and atheist in French) and I got to learn about life in non-Western cultures. The picture above is the entrance to the school. The obselick in the picture at the top is to all the students of the school, who have died in wars. There are tennis courts just to the right.

As part of Paris Plage, the city is sponsoring free concerts for the next few weeks. I went to one on Friday, which was a competition between two cities in France to see which one was the most rock. My friend at the foyer wanted to see the last group, Cocoon, but we had to make it through all the hard rock to hear this group, which was more soft rock. They sing in English, so Lena and anyone else who likes soft rock, you might want to go check them out on itunes.

I’m going to be outside of Paris for the next month, which means that I won’t be as easy to contact. I will do my best to update my blog fairly regularly. I’m off to Brussels tomorrow where I hope to eat plenty of Belgian mussels, chocolate, and maybe even rabbit cooked in beer, which is apparently a local delicacy.