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Lauren’s Quotes #12

[242-249] This semester I am taking 15 hours. I have four classes Monday, Wednesday, Friday. One class on Tuesday. A lecture and a lab on Thursdays. Both of those two really bad weeks, the four classes I have Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, they all have a big thing happening. My classes are Mechanisms, Numerical Analysis, System Dynamics, and Manufacturing CAD class.

[256-264] The first one, it was three tests and one project. My Mechanisms, System Dynamics, and Manufacturing and Auto Disc classes, they all had a test. Then also my Manufacturing and CAD class had also had a project due on that same week. The teacher had planned it so that the one class that had both the test and a project. The test was on Monday and the project was on Friday. There was plenty of time between the two, because it wasn’t a huge project. But it was still a lot in one week. But the other classes, one of the tests was on Wednesday and one of them was on Monday. I mean it wasn’t all due in one day, but it was still really sucky that you had four things due in one week.

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Lauren’s Quotes #13

[296-304] The mechanisms professor doesn’t really do examples. He’ll go through it and prove it and then he’ll stop and say, “All right, find the equation in the textbook. I’m not going to do anything else.” He’ll just stop and tell us to look in the textbook. It’s like we constantly have to be pulling out our phones to pull up the textbook so that we can get that equation that we need to be able to solve problems. Because he just decides that he doesn’t want to give it to us. Even though a lot of times we have time at the end of class for him to write it down or tell it to us. So, he’ll release us early, like five or 10 minutes early a lot of times. But he just doesn’t consider that it’s worth his time to tell us the equations we need apparently.

[307-310] He’ll get right up to the step before you write down the equation, maybe say you’re trying to prove that C equals the square root of A squared plus B squared for a triangle. He’ll write down C squared equals A squared plus B squared. But he won’t give you that last step that you need.

[314-319] I typically already have the textbook pages that we need pulled up on my phone. As he’s going through his proofs, I’m scrolling through the pages so that I can make sure I’m getting everything written down as he tells us that we need it. And then besides that, I make sure I go through example problems that have stepped worked out, all of the steps worked out, so that I can know how to apply it if he skips over that stuff.

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Lauren’s Quotes #14

[366-370] The first part of the CAD and Manufacturing, which we finished, was manufacturing. We talked about all sorts of different modes of manufacturing. The main two modes that we talked about were plastics and metals and injection molding and stuff like that for plastics. It was mostly casting and again, more molding for the metals. Now, we’re into the CAD portion of the class.

[371-375] On that first project that I mentioned was where we were designing a very simple thing like the wrench in CAD. The second project was more complicated. We designed a bike in CAD. Next, we’re going to be using CAD for analysis of a thing, not sure exactly what we’re doing with that because we just started talking about it yesterday. But we’re going to be analyzing things with CAD.

[378-382] All of the projects in that class, I believe, are solo. But you’re allowed to work with someone, like hey, if your friend is also designing a bike, y’all can work together to be like, “Hey, this is how we would make handlebars.” You can’t submit the same project. But you can help each other out. He’s perfectly fine with that.

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Lauren’s Quotes #15

[455-461] As far as my research, none of my classes really line up with the research that I’m doing. I’d say that the closest one is my lab class because I have to write lab reports for that. Writing a paper for the lab is like the closest I am going to get to my classes this semester. But next semester I signed up for a magnetism class as an elective. I might have a step ahead in the magnetism portion. But as of right now, none of my classes really have anything to do with what I’m doing with my work.

[466-476] Since none of my courses align with the research, when I first started doing the simulations, I sat next to my boss and watched what he did for the simulations. Then took notes from what he was doing so that I would be able to run the simulation. But during my internship over the summer, I still had a really basic idea of what the OOMF software was. But one of the people at my internship is someone who programmed the OOMF software. I’d go down to his office and be like, “Please help me. I don’t understand what this his.” He would explain how to do the thing in OOMF. Occasionally I still email him and be like, “Hey, so this thing, how does it work?” He made the program, so he knows everything about it. It was a combination of watching other people and then having someone who knows a lot about the program being able to help me when I needed it.

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Lauren’s Quotes #17

[7-11] During the beginning of winter 2019, it was nothing really positive or negative that I can really remember about it until finals, because finals always suck. My sister got to visit me where I live. She’s 10, so she’s really small, and was super excited and it was fun to bring her around where I live now.

[11-13] Then, when I returned back to school for the Spring semester, nothing really happening for a while. And then we took this test in one of my classes, and it was super sucky and super hard, and I got a horrible grade, and I was really sad about it.

[31-37] The horrible grade I received on an exam was a take-home exam. It was supposed to take 20 to 30 hours, throughout an entire week. So, everyone worked on it for a bunch of time, and was doing a lot for it. And it was a lot of working out, deriving equations on a piece of paper, and then typing them out into Matlab. And so, I’ve looked back over the exam since then, and the whole reason I got a horrible grade on it was because when I was typing it in incorrectly. I put a negative where it was supposed to be a positive, and it made all of my equations wrong. And so, everything ended up being wrong, and it was really sucky that was such a small mistake, and then I got a really bad grade.

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Lauren’s Quotes #18

[53-57] Aside from the machine design course, I only have two other engineering classes, and musicology. Musicology is an Arts and Humanities class. It’s been just pretty easy. One of the engineering classes is Heat Transfer. I had Thermodynamics a year ago, and that class was pretty difficult, but it was the teacher I had picked. It was very difficult with his grading, but you learned a lot. And now in Heat Transfer, I’ve got an easier teacher who grades easier, but he’s still doing really well with teaching everything.

[78-83] The professor is good at teaching because he works a lot of examples out in class typically, and I find that useful. His PowerPoints are well laid out, so he doesn’t have to go backwards and forwards all the time. And for the homework problems that we have, he gives us hints for them. So, the homework problems are typically really challenging and more difficult than the exam problems are, but he’ll give us tips and tricks on how to work them in class, so that we can figure it out. And because it’s more difficult than the exam problems, if you know how to work the homework problems, then you’re going to do well on the exam.

[111-114] The class is comprised of mostly lectures, but we had one lab where we took apart a rice cooker to determine how it worked. And then we’re going to have a paper in the next couple weeks, but I don’t really have much information on that yet. So, it’s got a couple of cool hands-on… like, it had a really cool hands-on thing. But it’s mostly just lectures.

[118-123] The rice cooker project involved using two class periods, longer class periods that are an hour and a half each, and we took apart a rice cooker. I don’t know how much you know about the inside of a rice cooker, but they have magnets in them, because we were doing this during the magnetism chapter. So, I took the magnets out, and we used reflectometry and microscopy to try and determine what type of materials were in the magnet. And that’s what we’re going to be writing a report on is, what the magnet was like in there, and how that affects how the rice cooker is able to function.

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Lauren’s Quotes #20

[228-237] Yeah, so my principal investigator was the one who offered me the research position. I didn’t go and ask for it. He offered it to me after I had been in one of his classes. I asked a bunch of questions in class and stuff that, and so he thought I would do well in research, and so he offered the research position to me. Not December 2019, but December 2018, so I started there January 2019. And since then, he’s been the one to like […] he’s a new professor at my school. I had him for his first semester there. So, he’s been working on getting the lab set up. So, I’ve heard from other people that new professors work more closely with their students than older professors who have been around for longer. So that might be part of why he helps out so much. But yeah, he’s the one that offered me the job, and then got me set up. And then he’s the one that’s helped out a bunch on figuring out everything, because I don’t have a background in magnetism, and I barely knew anything about it before I started.

[251-260] Here’s one that really introduced me to magnetism, because I didn’t, again, I didn’t really have a background to it. So he started off with giving me a textbook on introductory magnetism to read, to get a background on a bunch of different things. And then once I had read that and had asked all of my questions about everything, I started helping out with the lab. And as we came across topics, I would ask a question, and he would be okay with […] like, he would answer it almost immediately. So, say I didn’t know […] I’m going back to Curie temperature again, because it’s the thing on top of my mind. So say I didn’t know what that was, and he was talking about it, and being like, “Hey, you’re going to pull the Curie temperature off these graphs,” I could go and I could ask like, “What’s the Curie temperature?” And he would give a really good explanation right away, to be able to answer the questions that I had. It’s just been that way with everything.

[262-265] Then before going to the lab last summer, he was the one that was like, “Hey, here’s the project you’re going to be working on, and here’s the background info you need to know.” So, I didn’t really […] I wasn’t the one who started that conversation. He was the one that started it, so that I wouldn’t be confused when I got there.

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Lauren’s Quotes #22

[292-298] Since we transitioned to online course, I absolutely hate it. I concentrate so much better when they’re actually there in front of me. So, I’ve had to really work hard at not being distracted by a video game, or a good book on my desk that’s sitting there. And I’m ready to go back to normal classes when it hopefully, you know, that I’ll be back for the fall. On my phone, I had to set up a productivity app that would stop me from my going onto social media during class, because it so much easier when the teacher wasn’t there in front of me. So, I kept on going, being like, “Oh, it won’t matter if I just scroll a little bit,” and then it’ll be like, “Oh no, I missed like half the class.”

[306-312] In addition to coursework, I have to conduct research remotely as well. During spring break, I had to help him set the lab up to be totally remote work. I had already tested all of my samples. I was just working on pulling data from everything and helping write the paper. So, all of my work was already on a computer. It was just making it so that I could access it from anywhere and help the other people in the lab access it from anywhere. So, I mean, for me, it’s going on as it does normally, just like I’m not in the lab working on the computer. Which again, productivity issues, it’s so much easier to get distracted when you’re in the comfort of your own home.

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Tchuck’s Quotes #1

[195-201] So basically the idea is to get experience with engineering and all this stuff. What ended up happening was freshman engineering clinic was, it was alright, basically. They talked about a lot of stuff that I already knew. They went over like units and sig figs, conversions, stuff along those lines that wasn’t too difficult. They also went over, we went over engineering ethics which obviously is important so I do appreciate that although that’s been talked about in like every single one of the engineering classes so it gets a little repetitive. Obviously it’s important.

[232-236] And for the second half we had to, we had to use code to optimize a wind turbine and then build it. So we had to figure out what parameters we wanted, what we wanted it to look like, the shape of the blades and all that stuff. And then we built it and tested it at the end. So that I feel like is relevant.

[213-217] I would say the clinic as a whole I’m pretty sure is good. I’m looking forward to junior and senior clinic because that’s when we get like actually research projects. We’re literally going to be doing and making stuff. And I think we work our entire junior year on one thing, and our entire senior year on another thing. So it’ll actually be relevant and something that we get some say in it.

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Tchuck’s Quotes #5

[165-170] In addition to the difficulties with the physiological professor, I also have a problem with the electric and magnetism teacher. He’s this real nice Asian guy. His accent is a little hard to understand sometimes, but I’ve gotten used to it a little bit, but all he does is write his notes on the board off a piece of paper that he has and he does it very quickly. Also, you have to draw a lot of circuits and stuff and it takes a long time to copy down. It’s hard to try and copy it down at the same time as listening to him.

[171-178] I find that makes it a little bit difficult to learn the material. We even had a mid-semester review for him. Some other professor came in and talked to us about what he does good and doesn’t do good in the class. Basically, we all ripped into him a little bit, and he really hasn’t changed anything at all. Except for we have Wednesday labs, which are normally from 12:30 pm to 3:15 pm. We have two periods, tech and a lab period. He would always let us out after the first lab period, and someone suggested during their review that he should keep us for the two periods, because we’re already behind and we don’t know the information that well.

[179-185] Now, that’s what he started to do, but that’s the only thing he took out of the review. However, keeping us for us two periods, instead of one, still really doesn’t help that much, because he still teaches pretty much the same exact way. Honestly, it’s frustrating, because now it takes more time out of my Wednesdays to sit there and copy down more notes that he doesn’t teach very well. I’m definitely going to, once the next exam comes up, I’m definitely going to have to watch a bunch of YouTube videos and Crash Course videos to try and teach myself it

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