So, I'm a week into my time here in Germany. I have enjoyed this week quite a bit: it's walkable here and very pretty, and perhaps best of all I'm often able to talk to people in English. I'm working at the DFKI (in English: German Research Centre for AI), where there is an ongoing collaboration with the German Red Cross to better understand and improve emergency responses in the Rhineland-Palatinate region of Germany (where the lab is situated).
This week, I started by getting situated with the office and living in Germany, and while in the office I looked over a lot of materials related to the Red Cross collaboration. Mostly, this was going over other people's contributions to the project and getting up to speed on the math that was being used to model emergencies. There were a couple of factors impeding my ability to get work done this week: I couldn't meet with my supervisor until Thursday at 5pm, and I still don't have an account on the DFKI server. What this meant was that I was looking around different materials without a clear aim for much of this week, and because I don't yet have an account on their server I'm not able to access the Red Cross' emergency data (which is, of course, highly sensitive).
At my supervisor meeting on Thursday, I was given a lot more resources to look over and a couple areas of the collaboration that I could contribute towards. I did spend some time on Friday looking over this stuff, but it was only on Saturday that I realized that I was a bit lost. I guess this is where I had to summon the courage to ask my supervisor for more clarity on what I should be doing. So, I spent today compiling some actionable tasks I could work on that might be useful for the Red Cross, and asked my supervisor if we could meet tomorrow and discuss these. So, while the real courage will be summoned tomorrow, I guess I'm glad that I recognized the need to be self-forgiving, because one less productive week doesn't mean that the whole 3 months I'm at the DFKI will be unproductive. I look forward to the update next week, where I'm sure there'll be more to talk about :)
P.S. I spent a lot of time this week figuring out how to clean a moldy fridge, and this morning I (hopefully, we'll see when I'm back in the evening) solved the problem. Just wanted to document that somewhere. Baking soda is a miracle.