Day ONE : Fullskill 2012 Trainees - Part 1

It was a very cold 15 October morning. It was 4 degrees. The start of the new day and week. 

Today, the batch of 2012 trainees in the Fullskill programme start their first day. 

Here are some of the photos before the school day started ...

Chairs are labelled for each student.

Empty benches at 8am.

At about 8.45am, the boys start coming in.

This is Joseph. He is from England.

Each student receives their orientation schedule.

Henrik preparing himself.

Last march ...

Its the last march before the Fullskill 2012 course starts next week. All students have arrived and we're now sorting out their accomodations and permits. Henrik is checking the bench vice in workshop 2 since it was stiff.

Tasting it ...

Thats alot of applications and enquiries in the last few months for the February intake. 

For the record, we had to turn away many people because they were going to enroll into the programme for the wrong reasons. Thats why we created our unique Taster programme. No amount of research online or word of mouth is going to help. You need to come and try it for yourself. Thats why we created the Taster programme. Its meant to give you a picture of what its going to take to be here. Its not cheap but thats because Switzerland is not a cheap place to operate in. Try it out for one week. Take it as an experience. Otherwise, jumping into it without a hint of whats going to happen and you lose much more. 

Henrik demonstrating to a Taster programme enlistee how a lathe works.

This Taster enlistee hails from Iceland !!

Setting up ! The most important step ever !

Do it well and it comes out all alright ...

New stuff ...

The suction system is more or less complete. All thanks to Nicholas from Ulysse Nardin whom was a great help in installing them for us ..

Henrik at his bench. He's planning something interesting for the incoming batch. What would it be ? Wait a year ! Its a surprise for the students.

The foundation was also generous in supplying us with a cabinet to put stuff in ..

Finally, we have sofas in the school !!! 

Christmas was early ... sort of ..

Usually, after the watchmaker's holiday, a representative from the Ulysse Nardin Foundation would pay the school a visit to see if we need anything. Its all thanks to them that we have such a lovely school with state of the art facilities.

No, this is not for our Playstation or Wii. These 2 HD LCD TVs will be mounted above the teacher's benches in both workshops and connected to their teaching microscopes. Pretty standard and almost all watchmaking schools have them but with this, we take high resolution to another level. Also, if any of the teachers need to show any pictures, all they need to do is to connect their laptops to the TVs and everyone in the classroom can see them.

The Foundation also sponsored a new fridge since the current one is way too small for 10 people.

This is workshop 1 being fitted with suction and blower piping. In the future, if we need to add more benches, we don't need to ask a contractor to come down and reorganize the piping, we can do it ourselves via one pipe. 

New chairs and the handymen's tools. Its all in the works ...

RSS link to Twitter and Timeline

The wonders of RSS. Now we can update Henrik's facebook and twitter at the same time.

RSS Test 3

Test 3