A day at AIST

So today, let's talk a little about work. I won't go into the specific details since most people would find it boring and I'm not sure how much of it is covered by the non-disclosure agreement. Enough with the introduction and let me begin my day!

Usually, I wake up at 7.30 to give me ample time to do my morning routines. The latest I can go to the office is 10.00, which is when the morning meeting with my mentor starts, but I usually try to reach there before 9.30. My morning routines, apart from taking a shower, includes checking my email, doing my Japanese reviews and also sometimes watching Japanese kid programs (since they use very simple language) to hopefully improve my Japanese skills.

Shimajiro aired this morning on TV Tokyo

At nearly 9.00, I would leave my room for breakfast via bicycle. For the past week, I've had various kinds of bread and rice with seaweed from Family Mart, but today, I've bought Western-style breakfast from the cafeteria.

Don't ask me why there is onion soup in the coffee cup!

Then, I'd rush to the office and turn on the laptop. At the office, we cannot use our own laptops there due to data security concerns, but I can't complain about what they gave us to use for work. It's a Core i7 with 16 GB of RAM. It comes with Japanese Windows, but I've installed Ubuntu on it since I'll be working with Linux servers and Linux softwares.

At 10.00, my mentor, Takano-san and his boss will call me and my senior in for the daily meeting to discuss our progress and any problems we've faced. After that, we're on our own to work on the projects we were assigned.

For lunch, Takano-san and his friends usually take us out to lunch at a restaurant outside the campus. (His reason being we need exercise since we work in front of the computer all day.) Today, we went to a Western-style restaurant. My lunch is pictured below.

After lunch, we continue working on our projects. At little bit past 5 pm, there will be an AIST-wide announcement asking the staffs to leave the office on time, but no one seems to care and everyone continues working. However, I left the office a little bit after the announcement. (There is no strict work time here.)

After work, I usually either explore Tsukuba on bicycle, play Ingress or do the laundry. Then at night, I'd go back to my room and finish whatever I have to do on the Internet, call home using Google Hangouts and finally write this blog post.

And that's my usual day at AIST Tsukuba, thanks for reading!