Thomas Schwarze at LBNL, San Fransisco, USA

Introduction

I am a master student at the RheinAhrCampus of the University of Applied Sciences Koblenz with a major in Applied Physics. I graduated in 2008 from the Cologne University of Applied Sciences in Electrical Engineering.

Since I had a great time in Malaysia, while writing my undergraduate thesis, my decision to go abroad again was made as soon as I signed up for the master course. I just had to decide where exactly I wanted to go. There are several reasons why I chose the United States. First of all, I thought it would be great to get another totally different cultural experience after my stay in Asia. Besides that I wanted to further improve my English skills. Although everybody speaks English in Malaysia, they also have their own language and therefore the improvement in English was limited to a certain level.

Another quite important reason was that I got the opportunity to write my master thesis at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories (LBNL), which is an excellent opportunity to work for one of the leading laboratories in my field of study and that made the decision quite easy for me. Once I knew where I wanted to go I contacted the international office. They were very helpful and assisted me with the preparation for my internship, especially referring financial aid. There I got more information about the scholarship program “Praxissemester im Ausland” from InWEnt.

Personal Experience

After everything was settled with my host company within the first week, I planned a road trip for the second week. Since I got here with Jan Geilhufe, who is a fellow student of mine and also an intern at the LBNL, it made things much easier and cheaper in order to rent a car for instance. I had a very good travel guide (lonely planet) for Malaysia and so I got the same one for the USA. I think the lonely planet is the best travel guide one can have. It contains both, all the usual tourist places with a lot of background information and some insider tips, which I always find very helpful. So our plan was to go to the national parks around Utah, called the grand circle. In the end our tour through the mid-west lead us to the Zion national park, Bryce canyon, Arches national park, Monument Valley and the famous Grand Canyon. All of them having their very own charm and character with great hiking trails and attractions.

One thing that might be helpful for future visitors in order to save some money is to sleep at hostels in between two national parks instead of the ones in or nearby the parks. At least for the ones where we spent just one day, we always slept somewhere in between and drove on very early the next day. This however might not be the best solution if you want to spend more than one day in a park because one has to drive back and forth.

Besides the sightseeing, I am very happy that I got the opportunity to join a Softball team. Since I love all kind of sports, I thought this might be the best way to meet a lot of people. I really had an awesome time with my teammates. I met people from all over the world and we became really close friends. Although most of us never played Softball before, we even made it to the playoffs in our league. Besides the practice and the games, we also spent a lot of our free time together. We went on weekend trips together as well as sport events like Baseball and Football games. We celebrated Halloween and 4th of July and we even organized a day at the shooting range, where we shot at clay pigeons. For Christmas and New Year I planned a trip to the east coast, again with my friend Jan. Our first destination was New York, where we spent Christmas. For the next days we rented a car and we drove up north. We had a stop over in Boston, before we made our way to the Niagara Falls. Even though it was freezing cold, the falls didn’t loose their magic. It was both impressive and breath taking to stand at the bottom of those falls, dropping around 30m. After New Year at the Times Square we drove south to Washington D.C. The White House, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument are just some of the buildings that we visited here. Finally we flew to Miami in order to get at least a little bit of sun, since we only saw snow so far. Of course we didn’t just lie on the beach. Instead we took a tour through the Everglades, which was my personal highlight of this whole trip. Last but not least we drove to Key West, where we took a sailing trip through the Keys.

Work Experiences

Berkeley Lab is a member of the national laboratory system supported by the U.S. Department of Energy through its Office of Science. It is managed by the University of California (UC) and is charged with conducting unclassified research across a wide range of scientific disciplines. Located on a 200 acre site in the hills above the UC Berkeley campus that offers spectacular views of the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley Lab employs approximately 4,000 scientists, engineers, support staff and students. Its budget for 2008 was approximately $600 million.

I worked at the Center for X-Ray Optics (CXRO), which is a facility within the Materials Science Division (MSD) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory dedicated to advancing the science and technology of short-wave optical systems, including extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and soft x-ray radiation. CXRO scientists participate in the MSD research programs of Condensed Matter and Materials Sciences. Major areas of interest at CXRO include: nanostructure fabrication; x-ray interactions with matter; x-ray microscopy; EUV photo resists and mask defect analysis; and novel diffractive optics.

CXRO pursues a broad range of projects and develops new instrumentation to address national needs and technical challenges that impact materials, life, environmental sciences, and x-ray optics. The title of my project was “Magnetic Imaging of Epitaxially Grown Complex Oxide Materials with Transmission X-Ray Microscopy”. Basically I tried to find a way to study novel materials like complex oxides with the transmission x-ray microscope. So I spent most of the time in the Nanofabrication Laboratory. I was very happy about the capabilities this laboratory has to offer. In the beginning of my stay I received all the necessary training for the nanofabrication tools, the x-ray microscope and other analytic tools I needed for my project. The security standards are very high here at the Laboratory and so I had to go through a lot of safety classes before I was allowed to work alone on the different tools.

I really appreciate that I got the opportunity to work at one of the best research facility in the world. Thanks to my supervisor and colleagues, who supported me throughout my internship, I have learned a lot during my stay in Berkeley.