Mon, 19th April – Let’s start something new

Today we had our first “official” day at the TU Campus Garching on Monday. We met Mrs Nastaran Matthes, responsible for the student advisory service for computer science. She gave us a cordially welcome und afterwards led our way to Damir Ismailovic, who was planned to be our mentor during the next three weeks.

We got a quick tour through the chair by him and learned about the actual projects they are working at. He introduced us to Rebecca, another pupil, who is cooperating with the chair to write her seminar paper about collaborative learning games and also programming one especially for physics with the title “Physimons”. Until we went having lunch, we started a brainstorming session with her to gather some new ideas and to get an impression of what the program could look like in a final state. In the end there were some really good new ideas which Rebecca wants to use for her project.

After lunch, Mrs Matthes led us through the whole building, which includes the faculties for mathematics and computer science and showed us the most important things we should know. After that we had a break. During this, we used the time to have a look at the famous Allianz Arena.

But after all the impressions we had collected so far, the highlight of the day was still missing. At five p.m. there was the kick-off meeting for the “iPhone practicum”. The chair for Applied Software Engineering offers this practicum to students who want to experience developing software solutions under real business conditions. Real companies have some problems they want to be solved by the students. Because there were so many companies wanting to participate there were two kick-off meetings, one on Monday and one on Thursday. After the companies had introduced their projects to the students, there was a buffet and the chance to talk to the representatives to get to know each other or to gain some more information about the projects.

Finally, a short visit in the Campus Cneipe with the other ones from the chair finished our first day as interns at the TUM.