Introduction week. Day 1

8:30.That was the hour when those merciless Danes summoned us in the Sport hall. It is not that it’s hard to me to wake up that early, but come on! They could have taken easy. They welcomed us inside a great sport hall, which I wish we had back in the UPM. They split us in different groups depending if we are Master students or just exchange students. First fright, I do not appear in the list! It is what happens when you look at the wrong list. Once I find my table I head toward it and I find a folder on each chair containing a bunch of brochures with some useful information. Suddenly a guy appears and introduce himself as Kristian, my guide during this Introduction week. The rest of the group arrives and we are from very different places such as Germany, Italy, Greece (half of Greeks are here in DTU) Faroe Islands, Iceland, Mexico, Romania, Nepal and, of course, Spain.

After a light breakfast our guides gave us a tour all around the campus and this was the very first time I realized I was in an engineering school. The campus is divided in four quadrants with the Cartesians axis and you can locate every single building by its coordinates. It means that if you are looking for the building 134 you have to go to the third quadrant and (3,4) would be the coordinates in x and y axis respectively. Cool right? After this tour we came back to the Sport hall where we start a contest. We had some question and we had to go around the campus to find the answers.

After this we started the second task which is to build a bridge and a tower made by spaghetti and marshmallows. You can’t imagine how much pressure I had to suffer, they all turned at me and said “You’re the one studying Civil Engineering…” staring at me with “Oh master, enlighten us” so there I am cursing the time I decided to tell them what I was going to be studying at DTU. The torture lasted 40 minutes. I will safe you the pain of telling you the whole process. I have to say that was a really Spanish process, though. Hi! This is falling, use a patch. This is twisting! Another patch. So far so on till we got a patch made tower that ended collapsing under the inevitable certainty of our uselessness. My group looked at me completely desolated asking, what did we do wrong? The only thing I wanted to say was, have you seen those magnificent Quercus Robur just by the entry of the building…?

We ended up drinking some beers in the Student House, which humiliates any Spanish student association I had ever seen. Summarizing, a pretty good day.