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Joy’s Quotes #24

[13-22] Then going into Christmas break was pretty good. Then January term I didn’t take any engineering classes. I went abroad and that was one of the highlights of my life. It was amazing. It just so happened that two of my fellow engineering students, junior engineering students, were also on that trip. And we got to talk to engineers about their hopes and dreams for that country. So, it was really interesting to be able to apply some of the engineering stuff that I learned abroad. We didn’t get to do a whole lot. Also, in their culture was that women are not allowed to do these kinds of role, engineering type of roles. So, I wasn’t allowed to do much but I was still able to watch. It was pretty interesting.

[209-221] In their culture, when the youngest son gets married, his wife moves in and she is in charge of taking care of the in-laws, hand and foot type, bowing to them sometimes, until they pass away. And that takes out a number of the women, which means they cannot do anything. But I mean they’re literally just cooking and taking care of children all the time. Of course, they have many children in their families usually, so that’s not all the women. But in general, women do all of the cooking and cleaning and housework, but at the same time they don’t mean it to be demeaning. They just think that’s the way it’s supposed to be. You’re not required to wear skirts or anything like that, but one of their other cultural things is the youngest woman is in charge of pouring the tea for everyone. And they drink a lot of tea and their meals lasts for four hours. And so if you have meal prep of one to two hours and then a meal that lasts three to four hours and you do that two times a day, that basically fills up all of your time. So, there’s not as much room for women to pursue careers aside from taking care of their household.

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Joy’s Quotes #25

[222-227] But they were impressed, I guess they were impressed that I was an engineer. Then again, they think and most of the children specifically don’t really understand that America is just a country. They kind of feel like it’s this magical place. And I showed them pictures, so I’m like, “Literally your city looks like my city. Your city actually looks cooler than my city I live in. I don’t even live in a big city.” So, they were kind of confused when I would talk about the things that I would make with my male engineering cohorts.

[228-247] However, I think I found a couple women who are in computer science, but I didn’t find any studying engineering. They talked about learning programming in their high school. But when I talked to them about what they were going to do after that they’re like, “Oh well I’m going to be a parent and I’m going to do…” Which I mean, I plan on being a parent too, so I understand that. But they didn’t really think about technology at all in their future. They think that you just go to school, you get this degree for honor, for respect, and then you don’t really do anything with it.

I didn’t meet anyone who has graduated from college, any women in technology. Most of the college students I was talking with couldn’t speak super well. So it’s hard to have deeper conversations about about how they felt their role was as a woman in their culture. Because it’s such an honor, shame culture. They don’t feel any shame about the way they’re being treated. And honestly it didn’t feel degrading at all. It’s like you are praised for doing the stuff that you do. Just like the guys are praised for being mechanics and all of that. It’s a very loving place. They like their roles and they don’t really want to change. While I was abroad, they said, “Hey just make sure you’re aware. Do not try to do any manual labor because you are not allowed.” And I was coming in with a fight or flight instinct. “I’m going to prove that I’m capable.” And then I get there, it didn’t feel mean at all. They were thrilled that I could pour tea or they were thrilled that I could do anything.

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Joy’s Quotes #26

[248-256] Also, I talked to some male engineers and they were […]. I guess women don’t usually talk to men, you’re not supposed to make eye contact otherwise it’s considered flirty. I had to be careful with that, because when I would talk to male engineering students, they were getting the wrong idea about, because there was one of the three engineers was a guy. So, the other two of us were women. And so both of us we are trying to have to kind of balance that with having conversations while not conveying the wrong idea. This is purely a technical conversation, this is not meant to be, I’m flirting with you or something like that. But they didn’t seem ashamed of the fact that we were engineers. They were mostly just impressed because it was unheard of.

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Joy’s Quotes #27

[23-30] Coming back from [short] term, I was having a hard time adjusting back to being in America. Both time zone wise because it was 11 hours difference, which means I had just flipped my schedule 180 starting at the end of the beginning of January and then flipped it back at the end of January, which was a lot of change. And jumping with the 11 hour time difference, jet lag, going from jet lag to straight classes was really hard this semester. And this time I had another new professor and she’s not quite as good at teaching.

[262-296] This professor just graduated with her PhD. And I don’t fully understand this, but I think it was while she’s getting her masters, she was teaching eighth grade math or science or something. And so, her teaching style is currently, it’s been so long since she’s been an undergrad that she kind of forgets how difficult it’s supposed to be. And so sometimes she goes over our heads, but at the same time it’s basically she just doesn’t know what level we’re at. And so, she will explain how to convert from gigawatts to kilowatts over a span of five minutes and then just zoom past a brand new concept that we’ve never heard of. I’m like, “Okay, I know how to multiply by powers of 10. You didn’t need to explain that.” And then also just assigning homework on a daily basis, like assigning each problem on a daily basis as opposed to letting you solve them. It basically feels like she’s running it as an eighth grade classroom where she has to control every step of the process. And the goal of engineering is not to have people babysit you through every single step. As undergrads, we’re trying to learn these things on our own. So, it’s a little frustrating.

So it’s been a little frustrating because we go to class and we don’t really learn anything, because it takes an hour to get through one simple concept or one practice problem. Yeah, I don’t know. She didn’t really need to go into their practice problem or just any question we ask, she gets nervous about answering it. And so, if we question, we say, “Hey, I think you missed a step here, or this is a calculation error.” She’s like, “Oh.” She freaks out, and then goes all the way back to square one and thinks that all of her notes that she made for this lecture are wrong. Which is really hard because I’m like, “No, we’re not questioning your entire intelligence. You can pause, think about the question, answer the question, and then keep going.” So, that’s been very time consuming.

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Joy’s Quotes #28

[318-349] As for my not engineering classes, they’re going pretty well. They already offer online versions of those. So, that’s been pretty good. Let’s see, I’m taking chemistry two, college chemistry two. It’s a tier B elective so I have to take, I think it’s 20 credits in other sciences. So math, biology, chemistry, I can’t take physics cause I’m already taking so many physics classes, those don’t count. Yeah, so math, biology or chemistry. And I chose chemistry two because I’ve already taken chemistry one. And so far, I’m not doing as well as I was last semester and it’s not coming as naturally. But I appreciate how she teaches. She’s a tenured professor so she has lots of experience teaching the same class over and over again and is really good at it. She schedules her classes so that there’s lots of classroom interaction, despite there being a hundred people in the class. She has the roster in front of her with our pictures and she will find you and flat out ask you questions in the middle of class and make you answer them in front of everyone. And then if you’re wrong, there’s no judgment. She’s just like, “Okay, we’re going to walk through this.” And it stimulates learning.

We have, we use an online tool called Chem 101. They might have other like physics 101 too, I’m not sure what this company has. But for chemistry 101 she has the ability to create in-class quizzes and in class worksheet or work through problems with multiple choice answers and she commonly has us work with the people next to us. We’ll solve it on our own and then work with people next to us. So, this is really great because it covers all the learning styles. So, she’s lecturing, which is the verbal, and then she writes it down, which is visual, and then the hands-on approach or she lets you work out the problems yourself. And then she’ll kind of walk around the classroom and help. And other days she just lectures. And then she has my office hours as well. But because of the way she runs her class, fewer people need to go to office hours because she’s already helped them through. And those in-class participation quiz type things that don’t count towards a grade give her a really good idea of how each student is doing and how the class is doing overall, because it’ll give her all of the statistics. So, I really appreciate that class even though I’m not catching onto it 100%. I mean I still have fine grades in that class and regardless of that, I really enjoy the way that the class is run and I enjoy the content.

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Joy’s Quotes #29

[356-381] I’m also working on my junior project. In this class, there’s four sub teams now. There’s the printheads, so they’re in charge of mixing sulfur and sand into a 3D printable material, so highly chemistry related. I am not on that team. And then the fine positioning system, which is in charge of what you would think of when you see a 3D printer, it’s the three axes that move the printhead. And then another team is in charge of the course positioning system. We don’t know if it will be four wheels, but four wheeled structure that the printhead will then be on. The printhead can travel across the bar at the top, and basically, it just drives. And then another team is in charge of the GPS locationing system, because we need to know where we are within the world plane.

So I’m on the spine positioning system, so I’m in charge of the three axes that this printhead is going to move in. And on my sub team, my specific role is the structural integrity. I’m in charge of belts, screws in the actual structure. thankfully for me, that makes it really easy to move online, because I can use SOLIDWORKS or Autodesk Inventor to model this. And they have built in stress and thermal testing and all of that stuff, so that’s really good. I’m not sure the other people are going to test their stuff. We’re still working on a way to integrate all of it, because there’s something called LTspice, which can model circuits. So, the electrical engineer on our sub team, he can model the circuits, but I’m not sure how we’re going to model communication between sub teams. So, fine positioning system communicating the pretense location with the course positioning system within the planet’s surface. So, that’s something we’re going to figure out when we get there.

[411-417] Overall, junior project is going well. We have Zoom meetings in place of our lecture meetings, which usually lasts 15 minutes. I meet with my sub team in a Zoom meeting on Wednesdays. And I meet with the full class and all the professors on Mondays to get a plan for that week and for all of the professors to be aware of what’s going on. And then throughout the week. It’s only week two but so far each person has been working on their own and then we’re communicating with the group meet or Zoom, if we have problems within our sub team and we need to communicate that.

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Joy’s Quotes #30

[31-37] Around mid-semester, I was finally getting the hang of things and got into a groove and was doing well in my classes and then the week before spring break our school decided to send everyone home early and now we’re not coming back at all. So, it’s been a little bit of a struggle to adjust to online classes despite being homeschooled, when I was, like all through K through 12. But this is week two, and I think it’s finally settling down. Penciled out the career map last week, which was the first week.

[38-45] My professors are having a hard time recording lectures. The engineering professors specifically, are having a hard time figuring out what they’re supposed to do because we have labs. For example, one of my classes is junior project that will go into senior project and we’re building a mobile 3D printer that will print house-like structures on Mars. Or, that’s the research we’re doing. And that’s a really hard thing to do when you can’t build it. So all of our papers and prototypes are all simulated. A budget that we’re supposed to spend by the end of the month. So, that’s been a little bit stressful. But, I think we have a game plan for going forward.

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Joy’s Quotes #31

[433-442] Thermodynamics is probably going not as smoothly as the other ones. He already had a hard time teaching. This is his second year or third year. I’m in the middle of a take home exam at the moment and it’s seven pages long, and I’m going on 10 hours of work. I’m not done yet. His teaching style is not conducive with most people’s learning styles. This is my third class with him, so you just get used to it, and you understand what he means and he’s very kind. He’s trying. But it’s like, for example, thankfully we’re not in the classroom setting anymore, so we’re just doing lectures online. But that means that he goes through his PowerPoint and he just reads it, word for word, and it’s an engineering PowerPoint, so there’s not very many words.

[443-454] So, he’s just reading equations, like Delta X over Delta Y equals Lambda, over Lambda this, and just reads it. No pauses, nothing. He gets on the call, he says hello and then just starts reading, and there’s no inflection of the voice, it’s just straight reading for 30 minutes, because that’s how long it takes him to read the lecture. As opposed to […] Say, in the lecture we’re taking the full hour, because there’s back and forth. And even though it’s a Zoom call, nobody talks because that’s just not the way he runs his class. So, it’s a little weird. You just teach yourself and then you ask him questions via email if you need help. I guess he technically wrote the slides, maybe. I don’t know if he got them from the textbook, I don’t know if the textbook also publishes slides to go with it or not. So, he still meets with the criteria of interacting with students, but that class is a stretch. But so far so good. I don’t have an F or anything close to it.

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Joy’s Quotes #32

[46-51] Despite the difficulties associated with transitioning online, I like that this is stretching me in new ways because I am a very hands on person and I don’t have a lot of experience in that area, and I don’t have as much experience using online modeling tools. Not just online, but electronic modeling tools like CAD and LTspice for circuits and that kind of stuff. I think it’s a good stretch. It will benefit me sometime later in life. Not sure when, but hopefully it will. And I think that’s caught up until now.

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Joy’s Quotes #33

[520-536] In addition to managing coursework, I’ve been applying to internships. Now that I’ve been home for awhile, it’s given me time to apply. My dad is a computer science major and has helped me with resumes, and has lots of connections. So, we applied to a place […] We applied to a place last night and he had connections there. So, hopefully that one will work out, and I just need to find an apartment in a nice neighborhood and hope that this whole coronavirus thing will allow me to have a job in two months. Because if I don’t get my practicum this summer, technically you’re not allowed to graduate, because my engineering program requires that you have one internship. Your academic advisor has to meet with your employer and ask them questions about how capable a student is and their verbal communication skills, communication skills, work ethic, ability to problem solve, that kind of stuff. So, I need that before I graduate. I graduate next year, which means this is my last summer. But on the other hand, I understand that there are so many people in the same situation that the university may just have to adjust something. And it may be that my job that I get, after I graduate, they will count that as a practicum for the first two months.

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