He has eaten Joe's Pizza in New York, befriended the cleaning crew and spent the last three weeks staying at the home of the founder of the online data service Dropbox. The final touches of his research project with homemade piezoelectric nanofiber sensors are tough. This is the third and last part of the adventures of Julian Bos.

 

3. Final Countdown!

Even though I have been living several dozen yards away from my Ashdown apartment since Sept. 8, I still regularly do fun things with my former roommate Gabriel from Singapore. For example, we went to New York together. There are many tour bus companies offering rides to New York for a bargain price of around twenty dollars. Unfortunately, accommodation in New York is a bit more expensive, but after some research on the net, we ended up at an excellent hotel in the middle of lower Manhattan. We left early Friday morning so that we would have something to do with the day. The bus ride took us to New York in four hours where we got off near the Brooklyn Bridge. From the bridge and Brooklyn you have a great view of the ‘concrete jungle,’ or Manhattan's skyline with all the skyscrapers. We bought a weekend pass for the subway since the city is so insanely big. As many as 8.5 million people live there, which is almost half the entire population of the Netherlands. With the subway, we could easily get from one tourist hotspot to another.

Impressive

We visited the World Trade Center and the 9/11 memorial on the site where the Twin Towers used to be. This was very impressive. We took the ferry past the Statue of Liberty, which, along with all the other passengers, we tried to get a nice snapshot of. Tourist activities make you hungry, but fortunately New York is also the right place to be. All world cuisines are at your feet here. After filling our bellies with Ukrainian delicacies, we continued to be tourists. So on to Times Square. The ‘Big Apple’ never sleeps and Times Square certainly does not. Every day and night this place is full of people. There are so many billboards there and they are so big and bright that you can just feel the heat radiating off of them. At night it almost seems like daytime, but it really is night anyway so time to go to the hotel.

Joe's Pizza

After breakfast to Central Park. You could walk around here for a few days, there is so much to do in this park. The weather was lovely, plenty of sunshine and around 30 degrees. We would love to stay longer in the park, but of course New York has so much more to offer. After a few hours in the park, on Gabriel's recommendation, we had dinner at Japanese restaurant Ichiran in Times Square. Here everyone has a kind of private booth with a button to call the service and order food. After a while, a hatch then opens and your food appears, just like in Japan. After this we walked past the Charging Bull on Wall Street and got a slice of New York's best pizza at Joe's Pizza. While enjoying the pizza, we watched a semi-professional tournament along a basketball court. Then past the ‘Top of the Rock’ from where you have a great view of the New York skyline. Of course we could not skip the typical New York bagels, so the next morning we had a nice breakfast in a bagel shop and then visited the Williamsbridge and Chinatown. In Chinatown we wandered around a market and tried some food. Then, unfortunately, the weekend was over and the drive back to Boston began. The next day I had to get back to work early in the lab.

cleaning crew

Recently, the project has become increasingly busy. This was partly due to some new research directions that director Michael Triantafyllou of MIT Sea Grant had ‘momentarily’ come up with. So I was often in the lab from 9 a.m. to 2 a.m.. Even on weekends, I could often be found there until the wee hours of the morning. Because of this, I became friends with the cleaning crew, who always came by after ’office hours’. In the end, I completed the project nicely on time concluding with the ‘project defense’. The professors and the director were very appreciative of my report and my presentation. In fact, they were so impressed with the quality and quantity of my work delivered that they expect that my project may yet lead to the publication of a scientific article in a reputable journal.

Dropbox

And then my rental period at MIT Edgerton was over and I had to move again. This time for the last last period of about three weeks I found a normal house (so no MIT-dorm), which I shared with three other roommates. Via via I came to this address, because it is not easy to find a good spot here. Especially not when the semester just starts again and the city fills up with students. But this house is well located and it is also very cozy with nice roommates. Another fun fact: the founder of Dropbox also lived here. From time to time we still receive mail addressed to him.

Home

After almost 4 months it is now time to go home. As I write this down, I realize that this has been a long period of time. I can remember exactly the beginning of this adventure; time passed very quickly afterwards. I really like it here and I have met inspiring people and made many new friends. Of course it is also nice to see everything and everyone in the Netherlands. I can look back on a great period in America where I did everything I could. I learned a lot from my studies at MIT. And the experience of traveling independently to the other side of the world and arranging everything myself has taught me what it is like to be dependent on yourself. I am a whole experience richer and have seen beautiful things. I will never forget this adventure.

I would like to thank everyone who made this experience possible for me, Innovatiecluster Drachten, the University of Groningen, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and FB Oranjewoud. I'll see you in the Netherlands!

 

Julian's scholarship is made possible in part by FB Oranjewoud.