So long, fairwell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye

Just as the sun sets outside my office in Bonn, so too is my time setting in Germany. It is Friday, December 14th, which is my last day at work at Empirica, and soon Lydia and I will by flying off to Thailand to meet up with my brother for Christmas!

I've got mixed feelings about going right now. Leaving Germany will be hard, because Lydia and I have had such a great time here. Living in Bonn has given us the chance to explore Germany and Europe, and to go on many adventures together, which has made for one of the best times of my life. We've also made a lot of friends here, and it is going to be difficult to leave them all, especially as we were just starting to get to know them. That said, we are also incredibly excited to go to Thailand, and we are also quite excited to come home and see all of our friends and family again!

My experience of working for Empirica was also very interesting for me. The job had its ups and downs (I managed to do a fair bit, but not quite everything that I wanted to do), but it opened my eyes to a lot of things, and it gave me the experience that I simply would not be able to get in Canada. Aside from the work experience, this term gave me the kind of life experience that can only be gained through travel. I would recommend this type of co-op to anyone who is even thinking about the possibility of taking on such a work term.

I'd like to thank the readers of this blog for their time in keeping up with Lydia's and my life. I tried to keep things as 'infotaining' as possible, so I hope you enjoyed the read.

As I mentioned before, Lydia and I are now off to Thailand, and strictly due to the reason that we will be spending all of our time on having fun, I will not be able to make any blog posts while we're there;) We will, however, be returning to Canada on January 2nd, and we would be more than happy to give you all of the details on how many elephants we rode, how many cocktails we drank (if we can remember), and how many massages we had, if you would like to inquire. Feel free to drop us an email along the way as well (ty_bone@hotmail.com) to give us an update on how your holidays are going.

We miss you all, and we're looking forward to seeing you very soon!

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year! (and for Roberto Luongo to have a speedy recovery)

That's all for this blog,

Tyrone (and Lydia)

Work update - November 9, 2007

Disclaimer: this post contains information that may only be interesting to people in the field of health informatics!

Wow, my first post talking about current events....it's almost like I'm caught up in my blog (but in reality, I still am behind at least 3 posts).

It's just before the weekend, and I'm kindof in the eye of the storm at work right now, so I thought that I'd give a little update for my Hinf cohort, and for Dave, who told me that I need more work information in here for me to use this as my co-op report.

Over the past few weeks, I have been mainly working on 4 different tasks here at empirica. My main task has been working on a report for the European Commission regarding the current and future status of e-Health standards and standard development organizations (SDOs). For the most part, as explained earlier, this has involved a lot of research, and a lot of getting up to speed on the myriad of different e-Health standards that are out there in the world. Probably the main challenge that I faced, whilst working on this task, was the fact that there is a real lack of critical information about the standards and their development organizations available. In fact, for the most part, the only information that you can find on a standard, is the information that its development organization puts out. This makes assessment incredibly challenging, considering the obvious bias that a SDO would have regarding the information that they release about their own standard.

To give us a more critical view of the standards and SDOs, empirica chose to conduct an online survey of e-Health experts around the world, to get their opinion on how the current and future e-Health standards game is actually played out - my second job. This was an interesting task to undertake in that the survey tool that I worked with, Limesurvey, has a lot of features, and with a lot of features comes a lot of understanding. Also, the fact that this survey was going to be released to top experts and industry leaders around the world (i.e. CIOs, ministries of health, etc) with empirica's name on it, the survey was going to have to be flawless. It was my responsibility to actually implement the survey with the Limesurvey tool, which was set up on a local empirica server. It took a while to get use to, especially compared with some of the more user friendly, plug and play type surveys like surveymonkey, but after a while, even I was impressed with the types of things Limesurvey was capable of. With the tool, you can use html and css programming to create templates for the aesthetic design of the survey, then with those templates, you can add in numerous different types of questions (i.e. drop boxes, tick boxes, text boxes.....pretty much any type of box the heart desires....;) Another cool feature is that you can use regular expressions to perform validity checks on the text boxes. It had been a while since I had written any regular expressions, so that was another thing that took me a while, but once I got the hang of it, it was quite cool! To run a survey, you can either open it up to the public, or create a user 'token' table, which assigns one token to every user that you want to use the survey, and those users can only use their token one time, creating a secure, closed access survey. Once a survey is up and running, you can monitor the progress on the survey, run queries for stats on the answers that are coming back, send automated invitations and reminders for people to fill out the survey, and much much more. The main flaw in Limesurvey, thus far, is the fact that a user needs to have cookies enabled in their web browser when they are filling out the survey, and since a lot of businesses regulate whether or not their employees can have cookies excepted on their work computers, a lot of people are left not being able to complete the survey due to these policy reasons. The survey is currently out and we are waiting for our responses to come back before we start running our analysis of the results.

The third, and probably the most interesting task that I am working on, is the conduction of expert telephone interviews, again to gain more critical insight on the standardization situation. Again, this is polling experts, but instead of using the online survey, we are going more in depth, by using a semi-structured interview to gather the information. I helped create the questions for the interviews, and I also get to be one of the participants during the interview, which is quite interesting hearing the opinions of the world leaders in my field. It's also quite interesting to get the European prospective on things during these interviews. During the first interview I was involved in, I was made aware of the idea that e-Health standardization (or lack thereof) may be more of a market issue, rather than a complexity issue, and to get even more into detail, it may be an issue of battling for market dominance between North America (i.e. HL7) and Europe (i.e. CEN). This is something that I never really thought of before, nor is it something that I really think is the actual case (entirely), but it's an interesting opinion to take, and could be debated at length, but I'll leave it at that.

The last task that I was working on isn't quite interesting enough to mention at length (like all jobs, not everything can be interesting), but it basically involves editing.

Since I only really have about a month left here, I guess I still have my work cut out for me. Next week, I'm going to be giving a presentation to the staff at empirica regarding the use of the Limesurvey tool, which I had been working with over the past month or so. With that, I will be creating a guide of use for whoever takes my place on this survey role. I have also been told that I will be given the opportunity to work on a couple of other different projects here. Probably what I am most excited about is that I will (hopefully) get the chance to sit in on a meeting where international policy decisions are going to be made (it was one of my co-op work term requests). I haven't been informed of when or where this meeting will be taking place yet, but I will surely keep you posted.

Last but not least, Dave wanted me to write a quick blurb about who empirica is, and what empirica does, so here it is:

empirica has been in operation for (as far as I know) around 25 years or so. It is a consulting firm for projects relating to concept development, the application and development of new information and communication technology, and the information society. The bulk of project work, and project funding is granted by the European Commission. There are currently 38 permanent employees listed on the empirica web site; however, there are also quite a few student interns at the company as well. empirica projects are far reaching, giving them partners in the following countries:

(taken from empirica.biz)



Working at empirica is very interesting and very rewarding. I'm gaining a lot of knowledge about my field that I would not have been able to get anywhere else.

That's it for the work posts for now.

To be continued.......

Starting Work

After mine and Lydia's travels, it was finally time to start work. Unfortunately, when we got back from Amsterdam, I came down with a bit of a flu that didn't go away until well after I started work, so I was quite run down for my first few days. It was especially bad that I wasn't all too clear headed when I first started working, because it seems as if things here work a little differently than they do in Canada. In my previous work terms, I had about a week or so of company, people, and project orientation to easily transition into the work, this, however, was not the case at Empirica.

On my first day, I had about an hour or so to get my computer set up. This is normally quite easy for me, since I have spent most of my life working with computers; however, I quickly realized that in Germany, everything is German, including the computers, keyboards, operating systems and software. This meant that all of my messages and menus for: Windows, Firefox, MS Word, Excel, Power Point, Visio, etc were going to be given to me in German......yea!!!!!! (sarcasm). To remedy this, I quickly went on a downloading rampage, to see how many English programs I could fetch. I was able to get a new Internet browser and text pad, but everything else required a license (if I wanted to get it legally), and all of the licenses at Empirica were for the German version, so I was S.O.L with the rest of the applications. My last applicable English computer fix I could make was to change my keyboard into the English standard....even though it was physically still a German keyboard, with all of the the keys mixed around, but I printed out what a standard keyboard looks like, and I taped that to my desk as a reference.

After I anglofied my computer, it was time for my first project meeting. There, I was introduced to the first project that I'd be working on, which was an appraisal of the current situation in e-health standards. For anyone who knows something about this (and this will probably only be referring to my fellow hinfers), this is a very broad subject, that could be researched for years, with a budget of millions. The report that myself, Benjamin, and one other Employee from Empirica would be working on only consists of around 50 pages, and was to be completed in 1 month! For such a broad subject, this is a great task, considering there are similar reports, with a narrower focus that span hundreds (if not thousands) of pages, and the researchers had years to prepare the document, whereas we only had a couple of weeks!

From that day forward, I have been hitting the internet literature pretty hard. A typical day for me will have me come in at around 9:00am (although it isn't mandatory for me to come in or leave at any time.....as long as I get the work done). I'll fire up the computer and get set up for my day by around 9:30. Then, it's research, research, research. I have never read so many articles as I have read in this past month. It takes a lot of reading to be able to properly assess an entirely different health system, as well as the key players in it! Basically, for every page that I write, I'll probably have done about 5-10 hours of research (since the report has to be very condense to fit in the 50 page guidelines). I'll normally go off for a lunch with Lydia at around 12:30 or so (for around a half an hour to an hour) - hopefully to get some street meat (i.e. Brotworst mit Brot und heiße Senf - brotworst with bread and hot mustard...mmmmmm), then it's back to work. It's then research, research, research, writing, research, research, research, then I'll head off to home by around 5-7 depending on the day, and the urgency of tasks. Normally spending around 8-9 hours in the office a day (and for those of you who remember my salary.....that's about 5 Euros an hour (luckily, I didn't decide to come here for the salary). I find that I'm learning a hell of a lot while I'm here, and I'm gaining some great experience that will be more than useful for me in my later career.

As a side note, another useful tool that I have started using during my time here is the google personal web page, or igoogle. It allows you to create a personal home page that you can use wherever you have an internet connection, and on that homepage, you can add on really useful 'gadgets' which can be things like translators, calculators, local weather reports, etc. It's free to use, and really useful, so check it out at http://www.google.com/ig

As this report is coming close to the end, my work is getting a little more interesting. One of the tasks that I'm currently working on is designing a survey with the open source tool Limesurvey.
This survey (designed by me), is going to be sent out to around 100 of the top e-health standardization experts in Europe, which is pretty cool! I'm also expecting to be given a couple of different projects in the coming weeks to keep things interesting as well (I'll update you on those as they come in).

Departure/Arrival

Lydia and I finally arrived in Germany (after all of what was mentioned before). When first arriving in a new city, I highly recommend walking around for a couple of days so that you can get your bearings. That is exactly what Lydia and I did for a few days before our trip to Belgium, France, and Holland. Here are some of the pictures of our first few days of beautiful Bonn:


This is the beautiful city of Bonn, which is the birthplace of...

Beethoven

"Today, Bonn is a vibrant university city, a cultural centre that hosts prestigious concerts and exhibitions, a centre for technologies of the future and the headquarters for several United Nations organisations. People in and around Bonn really know how to enjoy the good things in life. In the summer they head for the wine bars along the Rhine to enjoy the views of the Siebengebirge hills where Riesling wines are produced" [from GermanyTourism.de]

Here we have some scenic, and some not so scenic images of Bonn (guess which one isn't scenic.....)















You can take boat tours to Cologne, Bonn's big brother city






























(if you said that this /\ one wasn't scenic, you would be correct)




















More scenic vs not scenic....(poor Dr. Lenne)







































After a long hard day of walking around Bonn, Lydia and I had our first Dinner in Germany. We ended up having a scrumptious currywurst (sausage and curry), which is the traditional meal of the area.




















Once we got some food in our bellies, we decided to check out the fair that was directly outside our house. It was quite crazy! There were dozens of beer and food tents, roller coasters, fair rides/games, thousands of people...good times had by all. We didn't spend too much time there however, because the next day we were planning on heading out for our grand Europe trip.

Certainly the coolest thing about the fair was this robot man that was dancing above the imagination ride. After about 5 minutes of watching the guy, I still couldn't tell whether or not it was actually a man in a suit or a real robot! The guy was incredible, so have a look!

Trip Preparation

In order to get ready to leave for this job, there were a few things that I first had to do:

a) Get a plane/other travel tickets
b) Find Lydia and I a place to live
c) Help Lydia find a job in Bonn

a)
Of those three things, getting my travel tickets was by faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar the easiest. When students needs to get tickets for a trip, the first thing they should do is check the Internet. Not only is the Internet your best bet for finding the cheapest tickets, but it also helps price things out (and with plane tickets, you really, really need to price things out.... for my trip, I found a price range of $300 after tax for a one-way economy class ticket to around $5000 for the same ticket). The winning ticket for me was found at the Air Transat site, which gives very cheap flights from Canada to Europe. The only catch is that the flights are budget, so there is little leg room, and you have to pay for any alcoholic drinks that you get, but when you're saving thousands of dollars, that doesn't really make a lick of difference. Here's a link to the AIR TRANSAT site, for any future travelers out there. I would also recommends going into Travel Cuts inside the Student Union building so that they can check with their resources to see if they can get you any deals. I am planning on doing a bit of extra traveling while I'm out here, so they were very helpful in arranging all of my extra little journeys (i.e. getting a Euro-rail pass), and with getting things like traveler's insurance.

b)
Finding a place to live ended up being a struggle. There were right away no shortage of web sites to look for accommodation in Bonn:

• http://www.e-rent.de/GEFSmrl.asp?Language=En&Stadt=Bonn

• http://www.zwischenmiete.de/

• http://www.mitwohnagentur-bonn.de/

etc.

And the prices were great (i.e. the average cost for a furnished, 1 bedroom apartment was around 350€ a month (equal to about $500 Canadian), it was simply getting a place that was difficult. It wasn't until the day before I flew to Germany (close to 3 months of searching) before I finally managed to secure an apartment (or so I thought it was secured). There were many reasons why it was difficult, but just to name a few:

• All but the first rental sites were in German, meaning I had to use the online translator Babelfish to translate the web sites. Babelfish is a very useful tool. It allows you to translate entire pages, then (attempt to) navigate through them as it translates, or you can use it for simple word to word translations in about a billion different languages; however, the tool is far from perfect, so I had tonnes of fun with that.

• Once I managed to find a place that I liked, I had to contact the people, which was a problem, because I don't speak German, and from what I have found so far in Germany, not too many people here speak English (compaired with what I have seen in other non-English speaking countries). Because of this, I would again have to use Babelfish to translate, this time my English apartment request into German. If anyone has ever used an internet translator before, they know the funny results that one can get through the translations, so when I thought that I was asking the landlord for an apartment, I could have really been asking for a frog for my curtains for all I know. After a while, I gave up on sending email requests due to my feeble response rate of around 60 emails sent and 6 emails returned. Instead, I asked to use the phone of the co-op office for my German calls (since calling Germany repetitively isn't too nice on the student budget), and luckily, they agreed. After I started using the phone, I started to find some German landlords who spoke English, and who had apartments that I wanted. This brings me to my next issue in finding an apartment:

• Germans have #*$@-loads of ways to reject you for an apartment! Here are just some of my favorites.....You are not allowed to stay here because: You have a girlfriend, You don't speak German (even though that person was speaking English, and I told him that I had someone to speak German on my behalf), You aren't staying long enough, You are staying too long, You are not currently in Germany (even though I would be there at the time the apartment was available, and I was willing to send a deposit in the mail)........but the winner is.............You aren't a young catholic male (I've got young and male down, and I probably could have faked being catholic, but that's just a weird criteria for an apartment).

As I said before, I managed to finally find an apartment for Lydia and I on the day before I got on the plane to Germany. I talked to the landlord on the phone, and he guaranteed that he would have a lovely, furnished, private, 1 bedroom apartment waiting for me in Bonn. Unfortunately, around 24 hours later, when I met with him in his house in Bonn, he discussed with me how in that 24 hours, he had given the apartment to someone else..... #$(@ Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you look at it), he had a room at his house where Lydia and I could stay for the time being. The problem with that is that he was a very shady looking character, who lived in a very shady house, with a lot of shady looking people, who included Jakob (a man who violently screams in German while he sleeps), Gerhard (who looked like Albert Einstein on drugs), Yetta (who was really the only nice one of the group, but she had a bit of a temper), Nick (a former roadi for Queen, which was awsome, but he liked to wander around in pajamas a lot, and he was quite weired, and Mustafa (a fishmonger who tried to rent out his shack next door for around ten times its value). With no other option, Lydia and I took the room, just so we had a place to stay for the time being. It turned out that they weren't all that bad, but the room was about the size of a double bed, and the house only had one washroom, with a shower/bath that had no curtain, so it was still far from ideal for us, but we did manage to get a new, far better place after we got back from our Europe trip (which I'll discuss in a different section).





- The view from our first apartment's driveway (there was a massive PNE type fair going on when we got there, which went on for the first week. It was fun at first, but falling asleep to the sound of screams gets old fast)












- The Shire (our first apartment here)
*Notice the lack of ROOM in the room











c) Getting Lydia a job was at first going to be a major issue, what with her not speaking German as well, and us only being in Bonn for around 3 months, but it ended up not being all that bad. During my first day at Empirica, Lydia went around Bonn with her resume while I worked. As it turns out, she didn't even have to go around, because the people at Empirica were kind enough to offer her some short term work to participate in while we're here.

Getting the Job

After Dave gave me the idea to work in Germany, Dave and I both contacted Benjamin about the possibility of me acquiring a co-op position at Empirica for the Sept-Dec term. Benjamin was right away interested in the idea, but wasn't really sure if it was logistically possible for his company. Empirica had never had a Canadian co-op before (they had only had European interns beforehand), so it was going to be difficult for them to work out a contract for me. I had taken 3 classes with Benjamin before, though, so he felt that he already had a good idea of what I was capable of, meaning I at least didn't have to worry about an interview (seeing as how we had basically had a 12 month interview already).

I decided to carry on with the normal co-op search (from within mycoop.ca), so I wouldn't end up jobless at the end of the term. During this time, my emails with Benjamin, and Benjamin's negotiations with his company continued until I was finally offered a contract for 3 months at 1000 Euros a month, around a week before the final co-op ranking day (decision day). This was both good and bad for me, good - because I was offered this amazing work-term opportunity, and bad - because it was for 1000 Euro a month (around $1500), which wasn't the greatest comparatively to the salaries that I would be making if I were to stay in Canada, which would be at least double that......and then I had to figure in the extra costs of moving across the world (i.e. plane tickets, storage, etc.)..... and then I had to figure in the fact that Lydia would also be coming with me, and it could be next to impossible for her to get a job in that time...... and then I had to figure in the fact that I was also really liking the other work term opportunities that I had through the normal mycoop.ca route...... so all in all it was a very complicated decision that I had about a week to make.

The decision process included a mad scramble on the Internet to figure out just how much money it would cost to fly and to live in Germany, a long talk with Lydia about how she would feel about moving to the foreign land, and in the end, a huuuuuuuuuge leap of faith, by saying what the $%Q#, let's go for it!

Finding a Job in Germany

Quite early before my last co-op term (I think it was mid-way before the term before the co-op term), I started contacting Dave about the possibilities of doing my last co-op abroad. I started out with just a couple of emails, and then once it was the term before my last co-op term (which was a school term for me), I started going to his office. At first we looked into getting a position at the WHO, but we quickly found that that looked to be next to impossible for an undergrad co-op student who only speaks one language. I believe their minimum requirement for taking in an unpaid intern was a Masters degree, at least bi-lingual, and 5 years international work experience, or something along those lines......not quite matching with my resume thus far. We then began to brain storm other possibilities, and one of the first ideas that came up was Dave's suggestion to work for my old professor, Benjamin Jung, who had just left UVic for Germany to work at a consulting firm for the European Union. At last word with Dave, Benjamin told him to keep in touch for possible co-ops (hence Dave's epiphany).

Working for Benjamin in Germany was quite the idea, especially considering that during his run at UVic, he was the most notorious professors for difficulty, and due to the fact that in Germany.....people speak German......and I don't. This didn't really bother me, however, since I had gone through 3 of Benjamin's classes, and although they were challenging, I managed to do fairly well in them. Also, through those classes, I had the chance to spend some time with Benjamin, both for school and away from school (HINF PUBCRAWL!!!!), and he wasn't always the hard-nosed professor he wanted to make himself out to be.... he's actually quite nice on his own time! I also didn't mind the German barrier, since I have found in my past travels, that even in non-English countries, one can normally get by on English, so that really wasn't (seeming to be) an issue either.

History of my Co-op

This all starts back to when I decided to join the joint csc (Computer Science) + Hinf (Health and Information Science) program half way through my csc major at UVic. Before I joined the combined major, co-op wasn't mandatory, so I never really thought about going into it, especially since I managed to get the ultimate summer job at the UVic daycare center in my first year. When I joined the combined major program, however, co-op was mandatory, so it was bye bye road hockey and rice crispy squares with pre-teens, and hello office work. Thanks to Dave Hutchinson and the rest of the Hinf co-op program at UVic, this ended up being a very good opportunity for me, since it gave me the chance to travel to many different places, meet many different people, and acquire a lot of useful work experience.

Long story short, when I joined the co-op program at UVic, my girlfriend (Lydia - who has been with me pretty much since I started at UVic) and I decided that we wanted to do two co-ops outside of Victoria and one inside of Victoria. I also thought that it would be cool for my last co-op to go out with a bit of a bang, and do an international co-op, a - to get some much needed international experience (since my ultimate career goal is to go into international heath work like the WHO), and b - because traveling is always amazing (even when it's bad....which is also something I've had experience with, but that's another blog), so why not.










- Lydia and I about to make yet another departure from beautiful B.C.

Introduction

Greetings all from Bonn Germany!

This is my first ever post on my first ever blog, so lets see how this will go....

I'm already a couple of weeks into my trip, and a few months into my co-op journey, so I definitely have some catching up to do. This catch-up process is going to be very difficult, seeing as how I'm already very busy at work (even though it's only my third day here at Empirica), I have just moved AGAIN into a new apartment in Bonn (so I have to get this new apartment in order), I have friends coming from Canada to visit my girlfriend (Lydia) and me later tonight, and I leave for Oktoberfest on Friday.....it's a very busy time in the life of Tyrone right now.

Before I get too caught up in my current activities, however, I should start from the very beginning, which was:

How on earth did I choose to end up in Germany?