Work Hard Party Harder
- Mike Zillo -
My motto during the Erasmus period, in the Netherlands
To party hard you must be organized and make all the work fit into the proper space and adapt it to the schedules.
So, as I am not someone that goes partying if some work is left behind schedules, while performing my Thesis in Wageningen (NL), I was literally planning every single activity to make sure I could have proper time to party during weekends (and week-days as well).
In Wageningen I was carrying on an experimental thesis about protein separation and characterization from Neochloris Oleoabundans, a specie of microalgae that was worth a small publication and a book publication
https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Protein-separation-and-characterization-from-Zilocchi/5663d4476bcaa940aa82c90980e437bc0358b6f0
During the weekend, we knew days in advance what to do, where, when and with whom.
Someone was cooking, someone else was bringing wine, someone else dessert and if someone was not brining anything to the dinner he/she was offering beers. So, everyone had a role as we always wanted to maximise activities during weekends. Especially when we went visiting other cities or going for organized trips.
All good. But partying could not be reduced or relegated.
That’s where I took this picture, about spitting fire.
And that’s where a team of 11 Italians cooked an Italian meal for the IESN (International Erasmus Student Network) for more than 180 people.
Here we were at the Italian soccer match against Spain (where we dramatically lost and suffered jokes from our Spanish mates for weeks, lol)
And here another party
In this party, the grill was made of a shopping cart with cut out wheels to make a grill big enough for tens of people.
The motto was:
Bring
Your
Own
Food
And
Beverages
Also said BYOFAB. Meaning that people coming and scrounging from others were not appreciated. So me and Valentina, another Italian girl divided the shopping part, as I was more skilled in choosing what to eat and she simply took care of beers for me and her.
That’s another way of organizing our time
And then, as I was conducting a chromatography experiment that lasted 10.5 hours, each day I was running a single experiment, meaning being the first arriving in the lab and being the last one to leave. So sleeping time was not really enough BUT, I knew when proteins where eluted from the pH profile, MEANING, that I slept in the dead moments and with an alarm, waking up when proteins were expected to be ejected and me being there to take the sample.
This was the chromatograph I used to perform the thesis with an Anionic Exchange column.
That’s why, even today, during weekends, I love programming them to get the most out of every single inch!