CHAN Mei-ni Minnie || BEng (Hons) Product Engineering with Marketing || Christoph Miethke GmbH & Co. KG, Germany
The two months in Germany was a tough test for Chan Mei-ni Minnie. Through the IAESTE arrangement, Minnie worked at a medical technology company in Potsdam, a city southeast of Berlin.
“Being alone in a foreign country, you have to try every possible means to tackle all the challenges,” she says. “This trip has strengthened my adaptability and broadened my horizons. It has been a fruitful journey for me.”
Minnie was assigned to the Marketing Department of the company which develops, produces and distributes neurosurgical products for the treatment of hydrocephalus, and was required to translate the company’s English webpage into Chinese to help the company enter the Chinese market. Through detailed review of the company webpage, which provides information about the pathology of hydrocephalus and the mechanism of the treatment products, and handling of the translation work, Minnie found that not only her language proficiency was enhanced, but her knowledge of product engineering design was also broadened. Minnie considered it a big achievement that she finished the translation work and had the translated text uploaded to the webpage before her departure.
Another task given to Minnie was to design an adjustment instrument for medical purposes for the Research & Development Department and to illustrate it with the computer-aided design software, Solidworks. Minnie felt glad that she had learnt to use Solidworks at university and had obtained sufficient experience in using the software from previous academic projects. However, she had to overcome the challenge of finishing the job in one week.
“The office closes at around six o’clock every day. To meet the deadline, I therefore had to work overtime by using my own laptop. Fortunately, I was able to finish the task on time,” Minnie says happily.
Travels with strangers 
Other than work, Minnie had some unforgettable travelling experiences in Germany by joining the Munich Weekend organised by the IAESTE Munich Local Committee. As the Potsdam Local Committee members were busy preparing for their examinations, Minnie had to arrange the transportation by herself.
Since it would be too expensive to travel by train which costs over 100 Euros for a single ride, she got a pointer from her local friend and tried to save her costs through “car sharing”. She then searched for a car owner who had the same departure schedule, hoping to get a ride from Berlin to Munich by paying her share of gas costs to the car owner.
“I was very lucky to find two seats for my friend and myself. We only had to pay 40 Euro per person. Compared to the train ride, it was a very good price,” Minnie says.
