Tag: encountering & overcoming difficulty

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lauren quotes

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 quotes

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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quotes tchuck

Tchuck’s Quotes #6

[436-445] Overall, I think that the clinic definitely is helping me feel more like an engineer because the clinic is probably the first real engineering stuff, I guess I’ve done. I mean, I don’t know if it would count as engineering stuff, but it’s research. I’m doing tests and doing experiments. I guess it does count as biomedical engineering, but I think that’s probably the biggest thing that’s made me feel like an engineer, because I’m actually doing testing myself. I’m not really supervised at all. I mean, there’s other people in the lab, but no one’s over my shoulder. No one’s telling me what to do. There’s no teacher. I have to figure it out myself with my lab partner, but yeah, and then I mean, the other classes, it feels like I’m getting through it.

[452-457] Because I understand that I need to know the information presented in class to obviously do the engineering and stuff. I also acknowledge that the way that I’m able to do the research is because the other classes that I’ve had. For example, the chem labs and all that stuff where we learned about safety procedures. You know how to do basic stuff. That’s why I am able to do the research and I do understand that, but I feel like doing the research and being in the lab myself actually makes me feel the most like an engineer

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quotes tchuck

Tchuck’s Quotes #7

[12] My last semester was really hard.

[102-120] Last fall involved a lot of studying, with a lot of people, I would say. I spent easily the most time in the library last semester than I have my entire college career. Just a matter of studying groups, just being in a quiet […] No, I mean, honestly, it was basically all with groups. Literally, people would just be in the library all the time. So, if you were just trying to study or whatever, people would just probably already be there. Or, we have group chat where you would just text and be like, “Yo, who wants to go to library and study?” And then, people would just show up and, I think that definitely was the biggest thing that got me through that semester. Because, I can study by myself; however, I don’t find it as helpful in my opinion because I like to bounce ideas off other people. I think two heads are better than one. You’re going to be able to figure out, maybe if I’m going to mess this up, okay, maybe you’re actually able to correct me on that. And I mess this up or then you mess this up and I help you on that or whatever. Stuff along those lines. Because I definitely saw that a lot in the group study sessions. And I mean, yeah. I think that’s the biggest thing. And then also, just staying on top of my stuff making sure my work didn’t get out of hand. Obviously, there’s levels of procrastination, I’m going to procrastinate a little bit. This is going to happen, but I just need to make sure that I don’t do it to ridiculous extremes where I’m stressing myself out so bad. I’m also typing up right up to the deadline, stuff along those lines.

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quotes tchuck

Tchuck’s Quotes #8

[725-737] The PI  is really nice. We have meetings with her. And so, it’d be, me and my lab partner and her and we’ll talk, and we talk about lab stuff, we talk about personal stuff all the time. She had told me about her kids and stuff along those lines. We have a really friendly relationship. I guess, it’s not necessarily super professional, but I don’t know, the way that she’s done everything, it’s obviously never made me feel uncomfortable at all. And I think that we have a good relationship. I think that she also helpful. I mean, funny enough, my friend emailed her a couple of days ago about something about classes, I think. And I’ve also emailed her four times since then and she’s responded every single time to me, but not to any of them. I mean, she also might just have missed his email and I feel bad for him, but, also I think it’s fun. So, yeah. I think that we have a good relationship and she’s been helpful in helping me grow and has been helpful in terms of the research and stuff along those lines.

[740-766] I’ll say, for instance, she sent us an article and admittedly I skimmed through it, not necessarily as much as I should have, basically. So, I sent back an email saying something along the lines that was wrong because I went back and reread the whole article and knew what I said wasn’t really right. But, I had said that and then, she had to call me out on it a little bit and told me to go reread it again. And obviously I didn’t feel good about that but I really […] So, then I literally went back and read it and took notes on it for three hours. I was like, “Well shit, I can’t believe I just did that.” But, yeah. I would say like, that type of stuff she helps out with. Just literally be, I’m going to have those meetings that talk with her and just bounce ideas off her head and stuff along those lines. And this is why what she shares with us I think has helped. Because she also has been a big help with different jobs because she’s also the one that, not necessarily come up with the […] Well, I guess she does come with the ideas because she also has to push each clinic project that she’s involved with. Because there’s also other people that are in our lab, but they all do different stuff with the worms. So, she also direct you where you want to go. And literally, even at all the way at the beginning of my junior year, when I sat down with her the first time, because, basically, I got assigned to her lab to deal with the worms. But then she more specifically has put me in a group. So, she was able to talk and she genuinely talk with me and was very concerned about putting me wherever I would want to go. And I just kept telling her like, I don’t know what I want to do, I’ll probably be good with anything. Like, I’m just down to experience whatever. Well, she kind of, I think, brought the pressure a little bit just because she was actually trying so hard to get me something that I wanted, which fortunately enough, starting with Sarah my lab partner, which, we worked together great. And, I did and still do find interesting what we were doing, unfortunately, obviously we’re not doing it as much anymore, but, yeah. So, I think in that regard too, also she helped me.

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anna quotes

Anna’s Quotes #4

[480-495] My Advanced Programing class is taught by this guy who is probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He started out as an electrical engineer, even though he’s teaching at a computer engineering class. He worked for Microsoft and was a software developer and knows all these sorts of things that I couldn’t even begin to dream about learning about. He really teaches with a, listen, if you want to learn, you got to do it, you got to practice, you got to go out of your comfort zone, and he does not spare us on the difficulty on the homework assignments, labs, and midterms. I walked out of the midterm thinking I had gotten absolutely no more than a 50. I ended up with an 80, so that’s good. This is the first time he’s teaching the class, so he really still has the passion for it, but he definitely wants to teach us more than he can. One of the things I really like about him is that he is working on research outside of class to map neural networks. I mentioned that earlier as being on the forefront of science and technology, which it is, so yeah. That’s really exciting. I think what makes him a step above my Circuits professor is that he cares about if you’re paying attention in class. If you’re not, he’ll call you out on it. His lecture is still interesting. He cares about the subject matter. He cracks jokes and tells stories and things.

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anna quotes

Anna’s Quotes #5

[500-504] This one guy from my Signals and Systems class, he’s just annoying. He zooms through pages and pages of proofs at the speed of light and he says, “If you can’t follow this, maybe you’re better suited in Culinary Arts,” and stuff like that. So rude. He doesn’t even tell us anything other than what’s in the book. Why would I pay attention to him when I could just read it later and not be berated?

[524-528] After he makes rude statements, he just rolls through the material. Nobody talks through that class or anything. It’s not very interactive. It’s very much him telling you things and you writing it down as quickly as you can, and he’s going to keep on going. He’ll laugh at his own jokes, though. I saw a meme that one of my classmates made. They took a picture of him pointing at the board and photoshopped Culinary Arts onto it. Terrible.

[584-590] I absolutely love my TA for signals and Systems. She does such a better job than teaching than he does. She’s really pleasant. I have TA’s from pats terms that I really loved that when I walk by them on the street they’ll stop and talk to me and be like, “Hey, what’s up?” That’s so nice. Overall, you just get your normal distribution of people. There are nice ones, there are mean ones, there are people who are interesting to you and people who are boring. I feel like the staff of college pretty accurately reflects normal humanity

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anna quotes

Anna’s Quotes #9

[92-112] For dynamic systems and stability was taught by a teacher that I had before. And in the class that I had him, he was callous and cruel. But in this class, he really opened up and was friendly. And he would look at me to see if I laughed at his jokes. And it was the first class that I have taken that really has to do specifically with control systems engineering, which is what I want to do. And I picked up on the information really easily because I liked it. And as part of that class, the big project that we did for it was essentially proving that mutual inductance exists. And that’s when you get two coils of wire that both have electricity through them. Because they have electricity, they have an associated magnetic field. And when you put them close together, the magnetic field interferes. And the purpose of the lab was to show did it interfere? By how much? And he gave us very little instruction. He was just like, “All right, prove this exist.” So, me and my good friend Francis who were in the class together, we’re pursuing very similar career paths. We crushed it. We went to the lab three or four times. I formatted our report beautifully. And we got a really solid method going. And we had a couple moments of, “Man, the math really isn’t working out here. Man, we busted our inductors. They’re dead.” But basically, at the last minute, after having started adequately early facing a couple really dumb setbacks. We pulled it all together, turned it in, and got 100. It was awesome.

[117-133] The last class that I had him for was a class called Signals and Systems 1. And it’s required class for all electrical engineers and some other engineers to take. And since it’s a required class, I viewed it as almost sort of a weed-out course, and he made it much more difficult than it had to be. With an obscene amount of homework, very difficult tests that didn’t really reflect the homework. And in class, he pretty much recited the notes that he posted for us. So, it wasn’t super helpful.            But in this class, because it’s something that he actually did for a living and it’s more specialized. So, if you’re there, it means you want to be there. He really opened up. He told us stories about how the stuff we were learning had actually applied in his professional career. And it was very well structured. We had one quiz every two weeks, and the quizzes were directly based on the homeworks. His lectures in addition to getting those stories, also had stuff that he didn’t post online. So, you kind of had to go. And I don’t know, he was just much nicer. He made the same stupid jokes that he had made in the class before, but they were less like, “I hate you. Get out of engineering.” And more like, “You can always drop out.”

[135-143] He hasn’t stopped making that joke about culinary arts. In fact, in this past class, he made the culinary arts joke. And he also brought up a new one, which is working for the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. And it just got into the rotation with the culinary arts one he’s like, “The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile is still hiring.” And terrible, right? Awful. But about halfway through the quarter on Reddit, I found a picture of the inside of an Oscar Wiener Mayer Mobile. And I showed it to him. I said, “Professor, before we start class, there’s something I need to show you.” And he absolutely cracked up and he said, “This is priceless.” It was a really good moment

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anna quotes

Anna’s Quotes #10

[150-166] So the course that I withdrew from was discrete mathematics. And that’s widely renowned as an easy course. The math is logical. It follows a real-life story that’s not difficult to wrap your head around. However, I had it at 9:00 AM Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. That’s the first mistake. The second thing was that although the professor was a good lecture, his assessments did not reflect the lecture material. In lecture, he would give example problems. He’d write out the theory. But then the questions he gave us on tests and quizzes were very tricky, challenging examples. Instead of the straightforward ones he had put on board. And I knew five people in that class. On the first quiz, none of us got above a 17%. And of the five people, all of them withdrew from the class. I withdrew because of a couple of things. I was getting really frustrated with the amount of work that I had to do. I felt like there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be succeeding in a math class. I’m very good at math. And I felt maybe pushing it to a later time with a different teacher would help me succeed. Especially since it wasn’t a prerequisite for anything, so it wasn’t messing with my long-term plan of study.

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Anna’s Quotes #11

[169-174] I also took a systems programming class, which followed the C programming class that I took the term before. It’s computer engineering, and I’ve always wanted to know, actually conceptually understand how computers work. And this class got me one step closer. It talked more about how the code actually interacted with the kernel of the computer, the basic operating system. And it was challenging, but it went all right. Not too bad. I feel like I learned a lot.

[197-205] So the challenging part about that class was that it was heavily theoretical and conceptual, and involved less programming than I thought it would. It was very much coding theory and how to avoid bad coding practices, and how the actual memory of a computer functions and stuff like that. And I was really not expecting to learn that through lectures. I was expecting to do some coding to figure out how to be better at coding. And it took me a couple of weeks to realize that I have to read the lecture notes. So, when I realized that basically he was going to assess us largely on knowing the theory instead of doing the practice, I started learning the theory.

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