The office

I guess some of you are wondering what I’m actually doing work-wise over here. To tell the truth, sometimes I do to. However, due to confidentiality reasons, I can’t tell you much. All I can say is that I’m doing research on thin film solar cells and hopefully the outcome of it will be my graduate thesis. Taking about confidential matters, often when I’m curious and ask something about the research outside my field, the reply from my instructor is that he can’t tell me, it’s confidential. Definitely makes me feel like I am part of the company…

Every morning I attend the morning meeting with my group of 12 people. It’s usually around half an hour long –all in Japanese! Sometimes there’s one graph or phrase I’ll understand, but usually I spend the time staring out in the office landscape with my mind blank. I have often heard people in Sweden complaining about open-plan offices. Well, here they are about 60 people in the same room, with desks facing each other and if you’re lucky a couple of shields dividing the room in two. That’s truly an open landscape of workers.

Often I’m surprised how much time my instructor can spend helping, or sometimes babysitting, me. He is also the leader of the group and one could imagine him having more important things to do than watching every step I take. Like last week, when he spent 2.5 hours with me in the clean room, while I was loading samples in a machine, starting the measurement by pressing enter and then unloading when finished.

Still, best parts of the day are the corporate song in the morning and the three o’clock exercise, radio taisō: