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Joy’s Quotes #21

[383-389] The professor for material science is actually brand new. He has never taught. He has been in industry for the past 20 years. And so, this is his first time teaching, at my institution or anywhere. I really like that class, because I’m going into mechanical engineering. So, his teaching style, it’s kind of like starting over, because he doesn’t know us. But he’s actually done an incredible job of relating this to the real world and to our specific areas of study as well. We were talking about strain and stress and field strength and how things break, under either tension or compression or tension … I forget. Anyway.

[390-395] So, we talked about real life examples of where this was a problem with the Titanic or the shuttle that went down upon re-entry. So, they went up, I forgot what that was called, and then, when they came back down, it exploded. And just a number of other examples. He worked in aerospace, so that’s why he uses those examples. So, a lot of his examples have to do with spaceships and planes and that kind of stuff. Spaceships, sorry, shuttles and those kinds of things. Spaceships are not real. But, anyway.

[396-404] So, he’ll bring up an example of how that happened in real life. Then, we get to ask questions about that and go into detail of, okay, so, what is the exact process of why this failed. Because he’s worked in industry for so long, he’s done a great job of relating what we’re learning in our textbook to real world examples. And that’s something we have definitely been looking for, because it’s really hard to learn about things over and over again. It doesn’t feel useless, but it’s just hard to apply it when you have not been in industry. And it’s nice to know that these things do have real world applications for like when we will use this later on.

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Joy’s Quotes #23

[6-12] Starting in December, that was the end of that fall semester and it was going pretty well. As usual, it was kind of like life becomes more stressful as you get closer to finals. And finals went well. That was probably the best semester that I’ve had grade wise and mental health wise and enjoyment from my engineering classes. I had one main professor that semester because our engineering department at our school is still growing since freshman year when three of our six engineering professors left. So, it’s been interesting getting used to new professors every single semester.

[57-78] During the fall, I think that I was taking heat transfer and then strengthened materials and machine design. Classes went really smooth for me and I’ve noticed that I don’t really worry about not being able to figure things out anymore. That’s more of a time commitment. Whereas freshman and sophomore years it felt more like I was […]. Like, when I would go into a homework assignment, it was whether or not I could do it, not whether or not I had the time to figure it out. Whereas now it’s like it’s a mindset. The mindset finally clicked that I know how to problem solve and I know if I don’t, I know how to get from point A to point B regardless of if I have experience in this area, which is kind of encouraging.

So, I think the best part about that semester was that it finally clicked that I could do this and I wasn’t really doubting my ability to do engineering. Also, it was a good semester because I’ve been practicing time management skills for a while, then I already knew how to schedule my time properly, which made […]. Basically it wasn’t stressful. It was enjoyable to go to school every day because I genuinely was learning, and I loved problem solving. And so, not when it’s easy, but that I guess I wasn’t scared I guess. So, instead of doubting myself I was more confident that I was going to be able to make it through this semester just fine, which reflected into my grades. I think I was still taking 17 credits and yeah. That was the weird thing. I was taking 17 credits and working 20 hours a week and I had a social life outside of my classes, which was new and yeah. So, life was very well rounded last semester and I appreciated that.

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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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Lauren’s Quotes #1

[137-142; 152-157] My first semester, I didn’t have many engineering classes. It was mostly like math and general education courses, but I did have to take a class called ‘Engineering 101’ and they taught us free-body diagrams and force equals mass times acceleration. It was more physics than engineering, but we had recitation classes every week where we would apply the physics to real-world stuff, at least try to. Sometimes the projects were a little sad. When we were learning about momentum, we would stack two golf balls on top of each other and drop them on the ground. At the end of the first semester, we had a project where we designed a puck launcher where we had to launch the puck across the table. You scored points based on where the puck landed on the table.

[143-149; 158-161; 165-170; 172-173] During the second semester, I took ‘Engineering 102’ where we did more stuff with circuits and harmonic motions. We were given a problem and we had to design a solution to that problem. For that one, my group got the assignment of a STEM toy. Make it so that kids enjoy learning STEM. My group made a basketball launcher game, like a tabletop basketball. You had to figure out what angle you’re throwing the ball at and what force. We chose to design a basketball launcher since it seemed to be the easiest thing that we could come up with based on the time we could all work on the project together. There were four of us to the group, but we didn’t really know each other beforehand, so we weren’t good friends and they just randomly assigned us. Our schedules didn’t match up all that well, so we only had class time to work on the project. I didn’t have as much fun as my senior thesis, but we got it done and we made a marketing video for it. We presented it to the class, and we got a good grade I also had my first mechanical engineering class in the second semester. I took a statics course that focused on free body diagrams. I still talk with some of the professors when I see them in the hall. In some instances, I would ask them how they were doing. Even though the ‘Engineering 102’ class was huge, 600 people, the professors still recognized me, and it was really cool.

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Lauren’s Quotes #5

[237-242] Thermodynamics was the hardest class I have ever taken. The teacher is great. He’s like my favorite teacher this semester. However, he makes everything so hard and I swear, I spend more time doing homework and stuff for that class, than I do for all four of my other classes combined. I started studying for the exams three weeks before they happened, and I still did horrible on one. But I’m enjoying the class a bunch and I really like the teacher.

[244-246; 249-253; 259-262] Also, he announced today in the last day of classes, that he was switching from being an ME teacher to chemical engineering teacher. So, I’m sort of disappointed I’m not going to have more classes with him. I mean, his class is super hard, but I can say that everyone who hasn’t quit has learned a whole bunch. I definitely know a whole bunch more now that I’ve been through that class than I ever thought I would ever know about anything thermo dynamics. And he covers a whole bunch in such a little period of time which is probably why everything is so hard on the test and stuff. We do a bunch of example problems in the class. He does a lot of proofs for the equations and stuff that we use. And just in general, the homework may have something that we didn’t explicitly talk about in class, but it helps us understand how that thing is because we have to work through it.

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Lauren’s Quotes #6

[274-277; 282-290] This semester I also took a circuits class that’s required for my engineering major, and it was 100% project-based, so we would do some coding thing with what we already know and then turn in a short paper about it. Then move onto the next project. So, this semester is the first semester that they’ve structured the class as project-based. In the past, it’s been a class that’s learning how to solve circuit diagrams, which no one liked, so they’ve decided to revamp it. At the beginning of the semester, we had a couple of lectures, but for the most part, it was new projects. The first couple of projects we pulled from the instruction booklet. The booklet provides information on how you make a light blink and just really simple stuff like that. Then for a little bit, our TA was finding projects online for us to work on. Eventually, it was like, hey, look for your own projects online to work on.

[293-298; 301-311] A lot of the projects were super easy, and we finished them in less than a class period. For example, the blinking lights was pretty easy, and then as we went through the semester, the projects got harder. The last project we completed took a bunch more effort, but it was also our final project and we had to do a presentation on it. As far as the final project, we were told to pick our own project. My group and I decided to find something that’s not simple like plug in a light and turn it on with a button. Instead, we found an automatic watering device online that waters plants automatically, but the code was a bit buggy. And the class didn’t like to teach us to code with what we already know. It was more, here’s how you wire stuff, but we had a bunch of trouble with debugging the code. Debugging the code was hardest part about the project. The presentations are pretty easy, it was two to three minutes per group, because we have a bunch of groups. And you just went up there, and you’re like, hey, automatic watering system. Here’s a video of how it works.

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