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Amanda’s Quotes #2

[129-136] First, I was kinda struggling. I remember struggling with some tests like I didn’t understand the question, and it’s not because I didn’t know what to do, like I knew the calculations I just didn’t know the words. Like if it said “counter-clockwise” I didn’t know what it meant so I didn’t know what it was asking for. I usually went to my professor after the test and was like “I’m sorry, but I don’t really understand,” and they treated me really well and explained, like helped me to reduce some parts of it because they knew that I could do it, it was just the English that I was struggling with. But then, after the first semester I was here, I don’t think the language has been a problem anymore.

[155-160] The programming class, I’d never done programming before. Another class I was working with matlab, so that one’s like totally new for me. I didn’t know anything I was not interested going into the class, it was a lot of work required in that class, I think it’s fun when you get it but it took a lot of effort I guess, like understanding what you’re supposed to do.

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Amanda’s Quotes #4

[211-219] That’s the big difference to home, like at home in high school you barely have homework and then at the university you never have homework, you have maybe like two weeks during the whole year and that’s it. From going from our high school where you have learned that you need to be self independent and professors don’t give you homework and then you come here and it feels like you’re in elementary school again, because they’re giving you homework for everything in class, even just a big difference which I didn’t really like in the beginning because it felt like just let me start it the way I want to start it and when I want to do it and I will do well on the exam. But then like I need to do this, like all the homework.

[219-222] But now after being here three years I still don’t like the thousand homework courses. But I’ve learned to accept it and I don’t waste my energy on it, like it’s a good way to be prepared for next time instead of having to do everything by your own.

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Amanda’s Quotes #6

[29-31; 13-14; 34] In addition to applying for internships, I’m taking a course in machine design, materials, heat transfer, vibrations and bio fluids. I received some good scores on my exams in vibrations and materials.

[42-45; 48-52; 54-55; 116-118] In vibrations, we are learning about calculating different frequencies, when, for example, a bridge is vibrating. So, if it’s really windy outside the bridge can start to vibrate, so it can collapse. Of course, you don’t want that to happen. The professor uses PowerPoint presentations, and sometimes he may start to show a YouTube clip with a bridge that’s vibrating. And then, he’s breaking down this bridge into simpler components, use like a square or something like that. And then, he says this has a mass, and you have a spring component that is this value, and then you can get these vibrations, looking at these equations. We also completed about seven quizzes throughout the semester and a small project about water towers. For the project, we had to calculate what the maximum diameter or the minimum diameter you can have for the water tower not to break while vibrating.

[59-67] The professor for the materials class also uses maybe 50% PowerPoint and the remainder of the material is shown on the board. He’s refers to a lot to real life scenarios in class. For example, although a material is really good, in some cases the company won’t be able to make money. So, therefore you can use this alloy instead. The lab is first it starts off with one, and a half hour lecture, so he’s just talking different materials, and different composites. And then, we’re going down in the lab, and we’re in the lab for maybe one hour. So far, we have done foil, and yeah. I don’t know what others, but it was some plastic, and epoxy and stuff.

[104-109] With the heat transfer class we’re working mostly with specific temperature, heat flux, and convention. We just finished a Matlab project where they wanted to find the temperature distribution. If you want to use convection, or heat temperatures the Matlab program that we coded would enter the temperature distribution of it.

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Amanda’s Quotes #9

[170-172; 219-224; 226-230; 235-240; 242-244] Now everything is decided, and I know what I’m going to do during the summer, I don’t need to spend more time on finding an internship. This semester I’ve started to have more connection with my professors. It started with me have to ask one of my professors for internship assignments, so I got a really good consult with him. And then, he introduced me to another professor that is in charge of a lot of different research projects at school. So then, I started to talk with him, so now I’m involved in some of his research projects. The main project involves hip replacement. When some kids are born, they have problems with their hips, so when they’re getting older they need a hip transplant. But, to avoid this, we can fix it in this early stage when they’re born. The project is with some professors from our school, some PhD students from our school, and also some professors and doctors. So, they’re really, really smart compared to me. I’m not a huge part of that project. I’m more there just to listen, and learn, and try to understand, and maybe in the future start to work on it, like next year if I want to stay at school. But, right now I don’t contribute anything. I’m just there to learn.

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Amanda’s Quotes #12

[170-172] Now, I’ve returned to school where I’m taking a chemistry class, chemistry lab, and a class that is called Biomechanics. Also, I’m taking Preliminary Design, which also has a lab for that one. I’m also taking classes called Instrumentation and Data Acquisition, and the lab for that class.

[177-179] In biomechanics, the professor had a lot of PowerPoint slides. We learned a lot about anatomy, and how to come combine the knowledge we already have from physics and calculate the forces and everything that can be implemented into the body system.

[130-135] Actually, I didn’t think we were going to use anything I learned from my internship, but now we have a project in Biomechanics where we are using force plates for collecting data. And that was a bit helpful, since I had used force plates during my internship. I don’t really know what we’re going to do with the data. Hopefully find out at some point.

[185-189] We used the school’s lab, which have force plates and a lot of markers that you put on yourself surrounded by a lot of cameras. The cameras will see all the markers. We can determine the movements and the forces, which is calculating the force plates, calculating the forces. So those two are combined in some way I assume.

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Amanda’s Quotes #14

[374-377] We wanted to go to conference to receive some more knowledge about how we could develop our ankle brace. To attend the conference, I had to be a member of the Biomedical Engineering Society.

[390-394; 37-407] The conference consisted of interactions with the faculty. Also, we saw a lot of schools promoting their graduate program. So, it was a lot of talking about their graduating programs. But then we also had the chance to attend sessions to learn more about biomechanics. One session was about injuries in biomechanics, and it was supposed to be a one hour, and then you went to that class, but it was 15 minutes presentation. But then one could talk about ankle injuries and some can talk about concussions, or something like that. So, it’s 15 minutes per presentation during this hour.

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Amanda’s Quotes #15

[235-243] During the instrumentation class, he’s just going over some PowerPoint slides. And he jumps all over the place, so it’s very hard to follow, and I feel like I haven’t learned anything in the class. It’s also no homework assignments and no tests, so then it’s kind of easy to accept that I’m not going to learn anything. Yeah. So that’s not very good. But then we have that class, but as a lab. And I felt like I’ve been learning more in that class. We are working with an Arduino, coding that to accomplish different kinds of tasks. But the tasks are very difficult to understand since we don’t learn anything in the lectures. So, it’s almost too hard of a lab, which makes me not learn anything in that lab either because it’s just too difficult.

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Amanda’s Quotes #16

[268-272] Oh yeah, forgot to mention one class called Advanced Machine Design. So, the first class or the first quiz, what is the module supposed to know from Intro to Machine Design. It was mostly a conceptional, so I didn’t remember it. Yeah. And they didn’t tell us it was going to be on it.

[281-283] Yeah, even though you have the software, is good to have an assumption, what do you think is going on? Knowledge, what you think is going to happen? Just because usually it’s always something wrong in the first set up of the computer.

[285-286] Then I just going back to check all the parameters that I have put in and make sure they are correct, and usually find a mistake in there.

[292-294] When I experienced difficulties in the machine design class, I started to study, whatever it was the quiz that they tested us on. And so, I learned that material, and then just tried to keep up with the current material, with the new material that he was teaching during class.

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Amanda’s Quotes #17

[299-302] Managing engineering and soccer requires a lot of time management. I don’t have as much free time as other student I’d say. But it makes me very productive when I have some time to do homework and making sure that I’m really focusing on doing it as quickly as you can.

[333-337] The faculty are very helpful. For example, right now, when we worked on the ankle brace, then in those long projects I was talking about. Even though one professor that signs for that specific class, all the professor around us are very helpful. So maybe the material professor, even though we didn’t don’t have him this year, he’s still very willing to help us to figure out what kind of material we should order.

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Amanda’s Quotes #18

[12-13; 27-29; 33] This semester started off pretty good because the school year starts off kind of easy like homeworks and it’s no tests. I’m taking two human factors classes. One is an introduction to human factors, and one is ergonomics. I’m also taking engineering economics, senior design, one graduate level class, and controls.

[37-42] The classroom experience for Intro to human factors is very, like it’s a PowerPoint. It’s very few words on the PowerPoint, sometimes it’s just a picture and then he talks about it for maybe 20 minutes for each picture. It’s very difficult to take notes since he’s talking. I usually always take notes but in this class I don’t because it’s very difficult to keep notes for someone that’s only talking, and you don’t really know what is important and what is not important of what he’s saying.

[246-253] Now, I think human factors is so much easier. It doesn’t require us much time to study because nothing is hard to get. I think it’s a lot of common sense, so you just memorize words they want to use. Now the design process is memorizing the steps or something, what are all the steps that make some kind of sense. In the classroom experience, I think there are a lot of stupid students compared to what I’m used to. I’m used to being surrounded by smart people that know some kind of general knowledge that can think outside the box. A lot of students in my human factors class can’t do that. They can ask stupid questions which sometimes can annoy me because it takes so much time for him to answer something that’s so obvious.

[255-262] But the hard part with it was that when you were studying for a test it was a bit difficult to know what was going to be on it because as I said before a PowerPoint can just consist of a picture. So, when we’re trying to study for it you didn’t really know what it said on that picture that was important that you should remember. And then I think some questions that in my opinion is very irrelevant to the topic that he can put on there. I don’t know the reason for it. Maybe it’s to see if you paid attention. But it has to have some kind of relevance or like knowledge. I’m used to only having questions that would show that we have learned something while they can have questions that doesn’t have to show anything that we learned.

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