20.- Wedding time!

"Dude, it´s been a month already since the W-Day and your posting it till now??". I know, I know. Sorry about that. Between the stress for the trip, the wedding, all the legal preparations afterwards and starting my PhD kinda kept me away from this, but I´ll make it up. Promise.

So... Let me go at it chronologically. Ok? Some months before my departure we started to get everything ready: wedding stuff, PhD stuff, travel stuff, work stuff, family stuff, etc. Good thing we took this extra preparation time ´cause otherwise we wouldn´t have been able to make it. Specially the last weeks everything was crazy as hell: at work in order to wrap things up and ready for my replacement, at home getting things prepared for the wedding and arranging our trip to Germany, etc, etc, etc.

The Mexican bunch

And finally the day to say "Adios, México querido" came, and before you know it I was in Germany with my family and with my future wife. Could you imagine 9 Mexicans in Bavaria driving a black VW van and loaded with tequila bottles and friends? I'm surprised we didn't get arrested! Just kiding.. this was really a cool experience since I got to introduce my family to a whole new world of people and costumes they've never had the opportunity to interact with, and also I got to enjoy sharing all that stuff with them and my cool international friends. Actually I think we kinda enjoyed too much: we partied for 5 days on a row (including the wedding party, of course), so you could imagine.

My best men

Finally the day came: civil wedding, church wedding and party... big day huh?..  How was it? It was awesome.. now that it's over... just kiding... May wife looked gorgeous on her dress, and all my family and international friends were there... there's not much else to ask for in order to have a perfect wedding. if you got these already. Of course not everything turned exactly as we planned it, but in an overall we had lots of fun anyway. That's also because actually the most important thing is that we had our moment to celebrate our union (at last) and we shared it with the ones we care the most... That's all we needed.

 

My international friends: 

UVM, UPV or wherever the heck we ve met... we appreciate your efforts to come to our wedding, and it was awesome to see you guys once more and share this special occasion. Just remember: I'm an "European" now so I might come and "invade" your place in the forseeable future. (hahaha don't worry I'm just being serious). 

Many thanks for your friendship and your support. You guys rock!!

The internationals

Check out our wedding website to check out some more videos and photos from our wedding.

Hasta luego.

19.- The Master

Ok, ok. I know, I know: too much about this Master's thing... Actually there's a good quote on that on one of The Big Bang Theory's episodes:

Howard Wolowitz: Sheldon, I have a diploma in my office that says I have a masters degree in engineering.

Sheldon Cooper: You also have a note from your mother that says "I love you, Bubbleh", but neither is a convincing argument for titanium over nanotubes.

Soooo... since graduating with honors from a Master of Engineering is that "common", I decided to just write about the thesis my partner M.Eng. Juan Martin Orejel and I worked on: The Classroom Assignment Problem at our university.

Basically what we did was to develop a little heuristic, simple enough to be handled by Excel's macros or even to be done by hand, in order to help with the class-classrooms assignment process. Nothing more! The beauty of this work is that it is actually based on our experience as Group Coordinators, which means we do know how the deal goes on when making schedules and programming classes and it gave us important information required to optimize the process.

Another advantage is that we did try to adress this problem trough a more "analytical" sort of way, using OR in order to obtain a mathematical model which could solve the problem. But as usual, the simplest solution became the optimal (if not, the most practical at the very least), so we decided for the cooking recipy.. cough cough.. the heuristic model instead.That's pretty much what I can say about the whole thing. If you wanna read it, I'm pretty sure it's gonna be available someday at our universitie's webpage, under the "Library" section.

18.- The following chapters

Well, it’s been a while since I last wrote something down here... hope I’m not letting any of my readers down with this lack of continuity.

There’s been a huge development on the things I’ve done during the last year after the crazy Valencia times. Once I returned I graduated and started working at Universidad Panamericana as a Group Coordinator of Industrial Engineering. Two years I’ve been working there and never been happier.

Recently, I finished a Master Program on Industrial Engineering and even finished up a thesis on a Classroom Assignment Problem using Linear Programming and Heuristics.

However one of the greatest breakthroughs on my recent life is that I’m getting married!!!! Next 14th of August I’ll be “walking down the aisle” as a matter of fact. Even better news is that I got accepted on a doctoral program in Mannheim, which means I’ll be studying my ass off for the next 4 years with my wifey right besides me.

Wish me luck guys!