Tout preparé pour mon stage à l'EPFL
With a nice apartment that I found in the nearby town of Morges, all was set up for my 3 months internship at EPFL. All that remained was a fresh-up of my French, as this is the most common language spoken outside the university. I regretted that I did not pay more attention to my French lessons in earlier education, but fortunately, for my internship work my knowledge of English and Physics were more important.

Actuator control using an event detector at TCV to avoid disruptions
I implemented a real-time, model-based event detector for LH-transitions, HL-transitions and ELM instabilities in control system of the TCV tokamak of the Swiss Plasma Center. I tested the detector during real-time experiments, where a plasma was generated in the tokamak. Finally, the detector was used to detect events and influence the plasma in real-time, which lead to results that are going to be published. The best experience was that on the very last day, during the very last two discharges, we used the detector to successfully detect an ELM-free H-mode in real-time, it triggered actuation and it forced the plasma to transition back into L-mode, by which a high-density disruption of the plasma was avoided.

I'll be back
I was really focused on getting as much work done as possible within the 3 months, so I to prioritized that over travelling. But I did notice there is a lot to see in Switzerland, so I definitely want to go back and check that out. I lived near the lake in Lausanne, its combination with the snowy mountains in the distance and France on the other side was very beautiful and made it a wonderful research experience. The EPFL community is great, the natural scenery in Switzerland was breathtaking and the food in Lausanne delicious. I hope to return one day.