Christmas is upon us, and instead of recalling someone’s birth, it evokes the end of an era: my first term at Southampton. If it were my erasmus, it would have caught me unawares. Ever since a couple of months ago, I’ve been noticing how time goes by faster than ever. I’ve been told that it only can get worse. That’s what growing old involves.

It’s been nearly three months since I started the course. So far so good, positive balance; hope it works the other way around with my lecturers… The way the masters works is simple: few lectures and loads of work. It seems to be a degree in time management rather than anything else. You can tell you learn a lot though. Besides, this bioengineering thing happened to be an absolutely good choice, since the subject is really interesting and good job prospects. I hope I’ll be able to talk about this in a year’s time. I might explain the programme of my course other time, but recently I’ve looked at next term’s modules and it seemed very promising.

The last two weeks are strongly marked by deadlines and coursework about to be due, but it’s not a strange routine. Nevertheless, pressure is fuel and things are being got done. The hardest bit for me is everything surrounding journals and papers: extract the information I need, organize citations (thanks Mendeley!), sieve bullshit, and so on. Precisely a few days ago I asked myself why this is so unusual in Spain. It didn’t take too long for me to draw the conclusion that, firstly, almost all the scientific publications are published in English, what involves that presumably every single student is competent in such language. Secondly, the profile of Technical Engineering education is rather practical, the scope was certainly not academic. I wonder whether this has changed with the new degrees up and running.

For the reader to picture a clear idea of how important is referencing properly, if you are caught with cut & paste on a report, you did straight away fail the module. Even worse, I think I’ve read that you could be expelled from the course. This is serious!

It’s been a week since I started working in the factory. I’m meant to be still in training, nevertheless I can already keep the machine under control. Basically, the running of the machine –which used to be a wonder of industrial automatic world 15 years ago– consists of putting three free-parts together into an assembly. The machine has three bowls with the raw materials and a turntable where the parts are placed, a screw is driven and good assemblies are collected, bad ones are rejected to a scrap bin. Worth seeing.

At the beginning of the week I was trained in different tasks. From now on, every single day in the morning I have to clean the soldering machines in the shop floor. There are about fourteen machines and I was told that I had to do everyday only the main ones, the rest every other day. I asked about the main ones and, as it happens, ten of them are busy all the time. It seems I’ll be busy as well. Watson is the bigwig in here. He has wide experience and always saves everybody’s bacon when somthing goes wrong.

He is a serious man, in his late fourties. He showed me how to operate the machine and I must see him every time it does’t run properly or I’m in doubt. During this time lapse I’ve noticed that he has a peculiar sense of humour.

Now you are in charge of a very accurate instrument.

After that, he gave me a spoon and smile. He explained to me how to clean the soldering machines where the solder is melt down at 240ºC. Over the solder there is scam to be removed. He also asked me if I knew what is the solder made of. I answered there is tin and lead on it. So, from now on, it seems I will be exposed to those metals on a regular basis. I’m not really keen on working this close to lead and tin dust, but at least I’m still following the Mediterranean diet, something healthy.

Apart from that, I was asked to do overtime last Saturday. Everything points to be like this in the near future, as the machine doesn’t run in seemly manner and they’ve run out of stock.