Eleven weeks in a Johannesburg lab, well outside my field
For eleven weeks over the winter of 2025–26 I traded the engineering buildings of Eindhoven for a cell-biology lab at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. It was the most a mechanical engineer has ever felt out of his depth in a good way — and easily one of the most formative things I've done.
The work sat at the intersection of engineering and biomedical research — building and running experiments to study how cells behave under the microscope. Almost none of it was familiar territory. I learned lab techniques from scratch, picked up the vocabulary of a new discipline, and got comfortable being the person in the room who had to ask the most questions. There's a particular kind of growth that only happens when you're a beginner again, and this was a concentrated dose of it.
Biology does not care about your project plan. Experiments fail, equipment misbehaves over a weekend, and a careful setup can fall apart overnight for reasons you can't immediately isolate. Learning to plan adaptively around that, to treat failure as data rather than disaster, and to integrate into a new lab, team, and country all at once taught me as much as the science did.
It also took me a long way from home. Settling into Johannesburg — a new city, a new culture, a new everyday rhythm — was its own project, and the part I'd least want to trade away.
The internship fed directly into my master's graduation project, which is ongoing. The work there is confidential while it's in progress, so I'll keep the details offline for now — but it's a continuation of the same research, and I'm enjoying seeing it through.