maggied’s blag

For the summer, I am going to be interning at Boston Scientific. Specifically, I will be working in the Cardiac Rhythm Management (CRM) part of the company located in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I’m in Research and Development, working on making pacemakers MRI safe.

My first few days in the mid-west have been interesting. I have never been here before, and all I had to go on was the stereotypes and bias I have heard growing up in New York and time in the Boston area. As it turns out I am enjoying myself. My housemate Jessie has a car and we were able to explore the area a bit on the weekend, and she’s slowly been convincing me that there really is stuff to do here. I’m starting to believe her.

I arrived ridiculously early Friday morning, after a 5:55am flight out of Westchester Airport. Jessie picked me up from the airport and we moved all of our stuff into our new apartment. You can check out photos of the apartment here. A few highlights:

After unpacking and napping, we drove over to Dinkytown, an area just outside Minneapolis, to get some lunch. From there we went to a Super Target, got plenty of food and other goods, and settled in for the evening.

Saturday was so great that my body made my pay for it in the form of a pink face and scalp. Well worth it though. First we went to the Farmer’s Market, which is open daily but most bustling on Saturdays. We didn’t get much from the market itself but had a nice lunch and browsed a bit. All the pictures from the market are here. A few highlights:

After the farmer’s market we decided to visit the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. This was definitely my favorite part of my stay so far. My dad and a few other people had mentioned that we needed to check this place out, and it was definitely worth it. I took a ton of pictures. One neat thing about the garden was that you could call a number and hear commentary about the different pieces. Some of them sounded like nonsense but others seemed interesting.

The cherry was by far my favorite. This sculpture is gigantic and sprays water out of the stem at the top:

Another sculpture worth noting is this one:

Now Jessie and I are both pretty convinced that those blobs are pieces of poop. It sure looks like poop. According to the art commentary, though, they are actually amoeba. What do you think?

There is another sculpture that is just a series of marble benches with bizarre quotes written on them. One of the most applicable and thought provoking ones is this one:

The text reads:

Affluent college bound students
face the real prospect
of downward mobility
feeling of entitlement clash with
the awareness of imminent scarcity
there is resentment at growing up
at the end of an era of plenty
coupled with reassessment of
conventional measures of success

There was also a huge fish by Frank Gehry (with Jessie posing):

And finally, this is a bridge that you can cross to enter a park next to the garden. I really like it for the linear perspective:

After the garden we headed to Best Buy where Jessie shopped for a GPS to help us with driving and I got a web cam to keep in contact with people for the summer. We then picked up Jessie’s dad who took us both out for delicious indian food.

Sunday was time to start getting everything ready for work. We had an early breakfast with Jessie’s dad before he had to leave to head back home. Then we hit up Super Target again for a few other supplies, followed by Rainbow foods for real groceries.

Monday (today) was our first day of work. We arrived at 7:45am and had new employee orientation all morning. In the afternoon I met my supervisor and started getting situated. I’ll be training and reading papers most of the rest of the week, but it’s been fun so far.

All in all, I think I am definitely enjoying it here way more than I would have expected. The weather has been great, everyone is very friendly, and it feels like everything has been going my way lately. I’m excited for the next few weeks, particularly my 21st birthday (June 21st!) and the fourth of July weekend.

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