POLAND - Levente Kalman

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Student: Levente Kalman
Week 1:
We left Ireland at 11:30 on the Sunday and arrived in Poznan, Poland at about 2pm. We could immediately feel the difference in the air, the weather was a lot better also. We met Ania as we were leaving the airport. She and her husband drove us back to Ostrow Wielkopolski to get to our hotel. We arrived relatively late but still early enough to be able to go around the town and explore a little bit.

On the Monday, we went into work and were introduced to the staff that are going to be taking care of us for the 3 weeks. They were telling us about the things that we will be doing during the course of our stay for the 3 weeks. In the first week we were working with robotics. We were brought around the factory to see what they do and how the robots are tested. We then went into the lab and all of us were programming the robots for the first week. It was very interesting and something I have never seen before. The robots had to be manually programmed with a tablet. In the evenings we met Mark while he was still here, and we went to go get food at the restaurants in the square.

On the weekend we went Wroclaw. We went on a tour around the city learning about the history and what each building was. There were a lot of churches and cathedrals, some even had bullet holes from the second world war. It was very interesting and very beautiful. We also visited the Japanese Garden. In the evenings we went out to the city to experience the nightlife and went to get food in restaurants in the city centre.
 
Week 2:
On the second week at ZAP, we started working and setting up our own virtual machines. We used these to install programs such as WordPress. This is an online application that can be used to create an elaborate website in any way that you would like. It also offers plugins that can be installed to, for example, allow people to pay with PayPal on the website. We found setting up the virtual device slightly difficult as we were connecting to a different computer over a network and setting it up on those and not our own laptops, we just connected to it from our laptops. I found the week very interesting, and I was always curious about how virtual machines work and how they can be set up as they can be very useful.

Over the weekend we visited Krakow. We arrived late at night on Friday and we had an early morning on Saturday as we went to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau along with the Salt Mines. The entire trip took over 12hours. It was definitely an experience and worth visiting. Auschwitz is a place that if you get the chance, you should definitely visit it, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana. On Sunday we went around the town looking at the scenery, the castles and just walking around the streets and enjoying ourselves. 
Overall the second week was very interesting and I think it’s safe to say that we all enjoyed it.
 
Week 3:
On the third week in Poland we were doing PLC programming. PLC stands for programmable logic controller. In this we used logic gates among other things to program buttons on an external machine. These were all link through network cables which we made on Monday morning. We spent the week doing tasks that got progressively more difficult and complex to work our heads around but it was very interesting and different to all of the other weeks and the type of coding we are used to at school. I personally enjoyed this week the most at is it what appeals to me the most. On Thursday we went on a tour around Ostrow with the people that are taking care of us at ZAP and they invited us to dinner at a polish restaurant to try their foods.
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On the Friday after work we book trains to go back to Poznan so we can be at the airport early and also to be able to look around the city a little bit.  In Poznan we walked around a bit, enjoyed the town before we fly back to Ireland on the Sunday morning.