Author: godwina

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Joy’s Quotes #1

[197-202] When I came into college, I had already taken Calculus 1 and Physics 1, as well as AP Physics. But in order to try to make my first year a little bit easier, I just decided to take them again. Turns out that that was helpful because I did not do, I didn’t get like, you know, 100% in Physics, so that was kind of a big jump between high school and college and like the workload required.

[229-231;239-242; 242-250; 262; 264-265; 289-300] Reflecting back to freshman orientation they said, “Look to your right and left, and in four years the person either sitting to your left or your right will not be here.” And I was like, “Yeah-” … I mean, yes. That is true.  I’ve gotten used to this now. But, yeah, freshman engineering, probably the hardest part was having all of my friends on campus not understand why I couldn’t hang out with them all the time or do things. This ‘midwestern university’ is a very social campus, similar to all campuses.  When my friends from the wing or the floor asked, “Can you hang out?” Whenever, I had to say, “No.” They were like, “Why can’t you just push it off?” Engineering is not like other majors where they complain about giving three-minute presentations. I think it was hardest having people get angry at me for trying to do my homework.

So yeah. I guess, socially was probably the hardest part of being a a freshman. Instead, I am very close with the other engineers. The juniors and seniors reach out to the younger people, as well, and are usually studying in the same places that we are. We study in a lab room all of the time including working on our design projects. For example, we had to design a laser gun that shot a specific frequency, but then we had to design a boost forward and receiver to responded to that specific frequency, as opposed to any other person’s gun or a solid beam of light. Then we competed with other teams.  Another project involved designing a plant watering system. We had to implement like four loops in C++. It was supposed to be 10 lines of code and ended up being a lot more than that. Letting freshmen pick their own projects is not a good idea. They over shoot and it makes life very difficult.

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Joy’s Quotes #2

[301-311] The majority of our time is spent on projects. We usually have one hands on project where we are responsible for creating a poster and designing a PowerPoint presentation for the end of the semester. Most of the time, we are focused on homework. The classes require 40 hours per week including lab assignments and lab reports. We had to spend many hours outside of the lab working on them. Then it took five to six hours to write the lab report and they ended up being fifteen to twenty pages. I shouldn’t have to go through that again. I’m very thankful because it kind of destroyed all of us.

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Joy’s Quotes #3

[139; 163-169; 173-184; 186-192] During my third semester, I participated in a job shadow related to my dream job. I found out about the opportunity through someone in my robotics team. One of the other students there has a family friend who mentioned that their parents had gotten in a car accident and were going through the process of getting prosthetics because there had to be amputated. And I was like, “Wow, that’s crazy.” But also, of like, “Can you tell me a little bit more about the prosthetics that they’re getting?” And so, the lady is very engaged in helping people, like college students than high school students pursue their goals, and so she immediately plugged me into the prosthetists and the head engineer at the company, at ‘national orthotic and prosthetic company’. And she contacted him and gave me his email address and all of that. And we set up a meeting time.

During my job shadow, he was able to fix something on his patients’ leg and put it back on their leg and they were able to walk out. And he ended up saying that I could come back as many times as I wanted. It was a positive experience. I’m also interested in working with robotics and prosthetics within production lines. I can’t intern with the company where I job shadowed, because you need a medical degree to work or you need the full degree to intern with him. But I hope to get an internship with the company that supplies the manufacture-able parts that they make. So not the custom-made part that fits onto the limb, but like the joints, the knee and the foot and the calf and just other parts of the prosthetics that can be manufactured. They said that they’re looking for interns, so I’m hoping that that I will be able to work there this summer.

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Joy’s Quotes #4

[643-660] I remember my cousins husband talking to me about his work when I was little. Sort of pretending that he’s not talking to himself by talking to a two year old so, growing up I was like, “I will literally never understand any of this.” Then coming back from college I’m like, “Oh, I do actually know what you mean when you’re talking about loops and other basic programming things, and just in general the thought process of going through a project from start to finish.”

Also, last summer, I was able to present the solar cell testing system that I created for the satellite. My part on the satellite was the solar cells and testing them for mass production, because the company that I was working for was trying to output 100 satellites that summer. Very small satellites and so I needed to test over 2000 solar cells because there were 20 solar panels per satellite, and my dad told some of his co-workers about what I was doing and they ended up setting up a meeting for me to come in because they wanted to see what I was working on. Which was crazy because, I don’t know, I guess I just always thought of all those people that work in cubicles as, I don’t know, just like they’re very cool and then I get there and they’re laughing, and they’re having fun and I’m like, “Oh, these are real people.”

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Joy’s Quotes #5

[6-9; 394-403; 428-444] In winter of 2018, we were finishing up the hardest semester so far. So, my third semester, and as final exams were coming, I ended up not sleeping for 52 hours in order to finish everything, and so that was probably the worst part of engineering in the past two years. I realized that I need to go to counseling, and I need to talk to the engineering professors and say, hey, this is a problem. You cannot put any other class through what we went through because that is insane. It’s different if one person was having issues and debating things that shouldn’t be debated about themselves, but if the entire class was having issues, I’m like, “It’s not an entire class of people who are struggling mentally.” It was the classes problem.

So I was able to talk to my professor about the problem because I attend a small school. I was able to go into my professor’s offices and say, “Each of you have assigned major things that are due this week.” I know some of those are hard deadlines because we have people coming from other companies to come to [our university] and judge us on our poster presentation. Since the external judges tell us what they think of how our engineering program is doing, we were unable to negotiate the due date. However, other assignments like take-home exams, and large homework assignments that did not need to be scheduled that week were rescheduled. So, I was able to negotiate with my professor and say, “Hey can you move this deadline to a couple days from now? Then hopefully I’ll be able to get it done by the original deadline. But it just gives us the opportunity to put it off for a little bit and spread things out more evenly.” So I guess being able to negotiate with my professors and work with them helps me navigate the low points of the semester. I knew that they would do that. So that was comforting, and then realizing that I made it through last semester so I can do this.

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Joy’s Quotes #6

[9-16] But after around Christmas break things got better because I was dealing with the stress and recovering from last semester. Then I moved into the [short] term which at my school is a time when you take one class that meets five hours a day for five days a week for the entire month just like you would any other class. The [short] term was intense, but easy. Then towards the end of the [short] term I was getting pretty worried that the spring semester would be similar to last fall.

[17-26] But as the semester started things got significantly better and I realized that last semester was a fluke, and it’s not supposed to be like that. It’s supposed to be hard but not that hard and about four weeks in I realized I had a lot of free time, and that was nice to be able to hang out with people outside of my major, and get eight hours of sleep a night like I wanted to, and eat on a regular basis, and feel confident about the homework that I was submitting. So, I life was going well. As the semester went on a bigger assignment was due and it sort of brought up feelings from last semester on when everything started piling on, and it just became overwhelming. So, I was just overall stressed out.

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Joy’s Quotes #7

[204-217] This semester I’m taking a course called principles of engineering, which involves learning about how both mechanical and electrical interact, and the analogies between them. This class was supposed to be harder than the one I took last semester. Initially I was thinking, “It’s just going to get worse.” And I’m like, “There was no way that I can do what I did last semester again: Just physically or emotionally, or I was still worn out. I was feeling better, but I was still worn out, and so I was just very scared that it was like I’d, “Like after all this time that I put in am I going to flunk out again? And am I going to be…”

So I was preparing myself for the absolute worse and then it ended up not being so bad, and I actually ended up dropping a class to decide to take it over the summer, because I was irrationally having so much anxiety over this semester that I was just like, “I can’t handle this. I need to take a break.” So, I’m down to 14 credits instead of 17, and it’s been really good. The class with the new professor is not fantastic but I’m not failing it, and I don’t feel terrible about myself in that class. I’m not getting A’s but I’m also not failing. So that makes me happy and I’m sleeping and eating.

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Joy’s Quotes #8

[264-267; 270-312] The professor for principles of engineering is actually the chair of the engineering department and he was actually my boss for the satellite project that just got launched into outer space actually last week. Since I had had him as a boss before I felt like I could talk to him one a more personal level than my other professors, and sort of say like, “Hey, are the sophomore classes not doing well? We are very concerned about this class that you’re teaching now.” Because the former professor that taught both circuits and this principle of engineering class, the group of them has left and so that’s why we had new professors for each. The chair of the engineering department was not the one that taught the class last semester. So, they split it up.

Anyway, so he said, “Well, don’t worry about that all.” And he’s like, “From what you’ve probably heard about me I’m an excellent professor.” He’s like, “I’m not trying to boost myself up and make myself look good, but I haven’t had bad reports come back from students. They all like the way that I teach.”

And I knew that I shouldn’t be worried because he was an excellent boss and very lenient. Very good at his skills towards explaining things and engaging his students I knew was really good. Yeah, so the semester started, and he addressed the class on the first day and he said, “We’re just going to talk about, the first lecture we’re going to start out easy. We’re going to go over what you think you know from last semester and we’ll make a list of the things that you think you know, and the things that you were supposed to know from last semester. And we’ll talk about…” He’s like, “I’ll give you a little bit of an intro on myself. Sort of my life story and you can ask whatever questions, and doubts that you have about the semester.” Either in his class or any other class. And that made us all trust him a lot more, and that just set up the semester for success.

Since then he’s done an excellent job of having engaging lectures where he asks questions on a regular basis. If anyone looks confused, he calls them out and he’s like, “Hey, you look confused. What can I do to explain this?” And if he can’t fix it in a couple minutes then he says, “Come to my office hours.” And labs go pretty well too. He’s excellent at answering questions and providing adequate instructions. As the semester goes on the goal of this class is to develop your mind into thinking like an engineer so he gives you, instead of giving you step by step instructions like he did for the first lab it’s more of you have a drone. So, this is our final project. We have a drone and we are supposed to make a thrust measurement system.

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Joy’s Quotes #9

[486-490] Also, I was offered a job with the company that I built the satellite with last summer, and they offered me a second internship. I said no because that would’ve been the third summer that I had worked in space and my goal is to go into mechanical with possibly the end goal being biomedical. Maybe get my master’s and become a prosthetist but definitely manufacturing engineering, I love that. I don’t want to build satellites.

[512-515; 522-526] I decided to work for a small company, again, but I think that it will be a good fit. I will be working with the CAD models and helping them do the grunt work on the CAD models and then also working with some of their engineers on prototypes because this is a new developing product. I had a connection from my robotics team when I was in high school. One of the mentors is one of the engineers of this company now. He was just hired and so he recommended me for this job which I knew robotics would pay off, and not just learning how to use a tape measure, but actually having connections that will get me jobs in the future.

[552-555] So I’m, I guess encouraged now that I’m at the end of the second year that I have a job that I’ve lined up, and that it’s something that I think I’m going to enjoy because the other part of it is last semester scared me into thinking, “Not only are you possibly not good enough but you don’t like this at all. This is miserable.”

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Joy’s Quotes #10

[557-568] Now I’m pretty positive about this. That this is where I’m supposed to be. I am good enough to do this and maybe I’m not good enough to do this, but the fact that I work hard and that my professors are willing to help me through this. No one can get through engineering if they’re just all by themselves. You’re human, you can’t, yeah. So professors are there to help instruct you and yeah, so they’re the reason that people are not homeschooled to get their bachelor’s in engineering. That’s not the way that works because you can’t do it. So I’m looking forward to having these mentors, these professors as mentors over the next couple years and increasing my knowledge of engineering as I get internships over the next couple summers. Crazy to think that next summer is my last summer before I graduate, but after the summer I only have one more internship because I’m thrown out into the ocean and expected to get a real job, and keep it for more than 12 weeks.

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