Tag: classroom and curriculum

Categories
joy quotes

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.

Tags:
Categories
joy quotes

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.

Tags:
Categories
joy quotes

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.

Tags:
Categories
joy quotes

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.

Tags:
Categories
joy quotes

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.

Tags:
Categories
joy quotes

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.

Tags:
Categories
joy quotes

Joy’s Quotes #17

[80-82] My engineering internship was a lot of fun, and kind of helped me regain my confidence in my engineering abilities and just kind of get myself out of the academic mindset.

[248-269] Because it was so difficult a year ago. Then, I was just so tired from trying that two semesters ago. This last semester, I was just really discouraged in my abilities to work through my classes and the homework. I was just talking with a friend about this, that it’s gotten to the point where the last time I can remember feeling like I’m actually good at something was high school. Because, you try, you don’t understand something in calculus, you just read the textbook one more time, and then you got it. Whereas, heat transfer is something, you fail a quiz, and then you do fine on the homework and that’s because you spent hours and hours and hours on it. Then, you fail a quiz, and then you fail a test, and it just keeps going. In other cases, getting A’s on things, and I’ve come out of the classroom, like, “Yeah, I have an A- in this class or an A, but I really don’t feel like I understand this.” I’m just fighting to go through that course.

Tags:
Categories
joy quotes

Joy’s Quotes #18

[261-269] So, it is kind discouraging to feel like I’m not good at this, and how am I going to make it through engineering? How am I going to make it once I get into the real world if, even when I get A’s and things, I still feel like I have no idea what I’m doing? So, it is really encouraging to talk to engineers and say, basically that, “Yes, your classes set you up with a foundation, but that’s not necessarily what you’re going to be doing. You’re not going to be applying the second law of thermodynamics, necessarily, on every single day of your life. You don’t have to have that memorized and understood perfectly and be able to implement every equation you ever learned in that class. Because, girl, you know you’re not even going into something that requires you to use that class.

[270-273] Or, I mean, differential equations. You’re not going to be using differential equations every day. It’s just like a foundation. And, because we live in a world with technology, and you can Google things, and you have mentor, senior engineers around you, you don’t have to have all this stuff memorized. It’s all about learning.”

[274-289] I think the process of having this internship and just the number of times that I went through designing and implementing small projects just made me realize that’s where I was. I would go to the senior engineers and be like, “I’m not sure how to solve this.” And they were like, “Yeah. Me neither. That’s why we asked you to do it.” We don’t all have the answers. The whole point of engineering is not that you go to a textbook and suddenly have the answers. That you figure it out. It’s made me realize I enjoy figuring things out. Whereas, academically, it’s not really about figuring it out. It’s about, you better know this on the exam and be able to regurgitate everything, and perfectly. Whereas, in industry, you’re able to make mistakes. Hopefully not big ones. But, make mistakes and you learn from those mistakes. So, it just gave me confidence in the ability to be an engineer. I think the people that I intern with said that they would love to have me back next summer, or even hire me while in term. And so, I was like, “Wow.” It was a success, and I was like, “Okay.” Engineering is not necessarily what college makes it out to be. And so, it’s just a nice reset button on my thinking of what engineering is.

Tags:
Categories
joy quotes

Joy’s Quotes #19

[305-311] As for the classroom, I feel that I know my professors better and they know me better. They’re able to tailor the classes better to how they know us. And just that trusting, like if we have a question, we’re going to raise our hand, we’re not going to just sit there and be confused. If we ask for an extension, they know which students don’t do the work and are just asking cause they’re lazy and which people genuinely try.

[312-317] So, I guess the respect and just the mentorship. As a freshmen, you don’t really know your professors all that well. Even at a small school, you don’t really know them. And as a junior now, I definitely think that it’s more personalized in the way that I can go to their office hours and, yeah, I don’t know, talk to them on both mentorship level, like asking them what I should do for an internship or career related questions as well as helping on a heat transfer exam or material science stuff.

[318-330] So, separate from the professors themselves, as for the classes, I think I’ve finally gotten used to the workload. And so, in class, I’m not as stressed about writing down every single word that they say. And it’s more of just learning the material and less scrambling. I realize that I’m going to understand this. So, I guess, not as fear-driven. I still have the same number of labs and projects and stuff, because, the way my program works. They want freshmen through seniors to work on projects on a regular basis. And so, I really don’t have any more labs. As for the lecture style, it’s still pretty much the same as freshman and sophomore year, just based on the class. I don’t have any engineering labs this semester. I’m taking chemistry, which is a piece of cake, because it’s freshman chemistry and I’m a junior. But it’s one of my gen-ed classes that I have to take. I guess I would say it’s interesting to have only lecture classes instead of lab classes for my engineering classes.

Tags:
Categories
joy quotes

Joy’s Quotes #20

[335-341] In my heat transfer class this semester, it’s [the professor’s] second year teaching. And last year, for example, he taught a class, and it was huge. It was very difficult. Because he didn’t know any of us, and so, trying to talk to him about homework or, basically anything, was impossible, because he just … Yeah, I don’t know. He was just kind of scared of the whole teaching experience and not confident in his abilities, necessarily, and felt like he didn’t think that we liked him, and it was just a struggle.

[342-348] Whereas, this semester, not only has he been in industry making air conditioning units and heating units for the past 30 years of his life, so, heat transfer is his thing. It’s, let’s see … I’m trying to think of a specific example. I guess he calls on us more in class, almost like in high school. He knows each person’s name and what they struggle with and what they’re good at, necessarily. And so, engaging us in class, specifically saying, “Joy, do you know this example,” or, “Eric,” whoever. It’s like asking them, “What is the answer to this?” Or, “Why is this the way it is?”

[349-359] Also, he applies the lesson to what we want to do in our lives. And so, he will be like, “Hey, so, for mechanical engineers, we can look at heat transfer through this perspective. “But he’d also relate it to the electrical engineer. “Each one of the substances that the heat is flowing through can be represented as a resistor. You can make a circuit that is analogous to the system that we have.”

Tags: