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amanda quotes

Amanda’s Family & Childhood

[2-6] So I am from [European country]. Then I wanted to come to the U.S. to start playing soccer at the same time, in high school in [European country]you can choose what track you want to do, if you want to more towards engineering or economics and stuff, so I chose to do engineering because I like math. And then when I got here, I got into to school mostly because of the soccer team and I just wanted to do something that was involving math because I kind of like to think.

[14-16] I looked what kind of courses every track offered, and that’s why I chose to do the engineering part, because it’s more like calculations and stuff, and that was the courses I liked in elementary school.

[22-25] Yeah, like my whole family, they are kinda interested and good at more like the math part than like, drawing and stuff. So then I think I was able to get a lot of help from home, and therefore, I kinda got good at math and I think you start to like stuff that you’re good at.

[71-77] I think it’s just probably moving this far and not having family close makes it more self independent. Of course, I have developed my English skills enough, but it’s like a deeper personal experience and development than if I had just stayed home and studied. You feel like you’re moving away from all the safety you had, like you don’t know anyone and figure out everything myself. From living at home and having your parents there to support you to not having them. It has developed me a lot as a person. I think it’s worth it. I want to try new things I think it just makes me grow.

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amanda quotes

Amanda’s Quotes #1

[83-86] So then I picked engineering because I was good at math, like of course I could pick something easier when I got here, it doesn’t matter what I picked in high school. But I felt like I just wanted to keep going, because I felt like I kinda knew what I was doing.

[137-139] And since we do one more year in [European country] high school I had already taken some engineering classes which I hadn’t gotten credit for here, I had done a lot of what we did my first year.

[89-95] And at home if you want to do engineering it’s five years, here it’s four years. Even felt really comparable, I just heard of math engineering and physics, like here it sounds like math and physics. So I started and after one week I realized it was going to be a lot of space classes, space school like an aeronautical school and that’s not really what I wanted to do. Then when I was here I started to look into other majors and I pick the broadest one which is called mechanical engineering.

[98-102] It was more I knew what I didn’t want to do, like I didn’t want to do space, so therefore a lot of the engineering majors here at school was not an option. So there was more between mechanical and civil. I knew I didn’t want to do the standard engineering stuff like rolls and pitches and stuff, so then mechanical was the only one left.

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amanda quotes

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 #3

[167-172] Yeah, one class that all engineers is [Intro engineering course], that we’re having a few projects throughout the semester, one was you were supposed to design an airplane or you were supposed to do the calculations, you were not really suppose to design it, like how much air and drag it had, and it would give you some practice, like it would need to be able to fly from here to Europe and then you need to do some assumptions and calculations, so that was more like a math project.

[172-177] And we had a second project, you were supposed to do a ball launcher for a dog which the dog can use without the owner being home. That was a lot of math calculations, maybe like what angle you wanted the ball to be thrown in and stuff, but that one we were actually supposed to build. We didn’t design it on the computer because we hadn’t learned how to do that so we just had to sketch on the paper and a few classes you can be in workshop and working on it.

[185-194] I’m just the kind of person that wants stuff to be done as quick as possible and not to do it the night before, so I think I usually take the role where I’m like trying to make a group of the students pass the ball and like making sure we get started. But then, I think we stayed equal amongst all of us. Some people come with some ideas what kind of ball launch we could do and all of us came up with like two different ideas that was like what we decided to do, and then one day we met up and just discussed which one we liked the most. There was a combination of two of them and then we started to build and there was one guy in our group that had been a worker once, so he kinda knew the most and he kinda told us what to do and how to build it.

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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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Josh’s Family & Childhood

[11-15] I come from a middle class family, and I’m an only child. My father went to vocational school for construction, sprinkler fitting, and that was the maximum amount of education he had. My mother went to college. She’s a nurse, and she recently got her master’s. I have a big family; I have some people who have gone to college and some people who haven’t.

[101-112] My parents never really told me what to do. They were always kind of in the mindset of, “Do what you want, do what makes you happy, we’ll support you.” Whatever I decide is fine, so I never really had a reason to go anywhere because of them. I think from the beginning, my mind was pretty set on a science field so it didn’t take a lot of encouragement to pursue that.

[19-24] When I was in middle school, I changed my desires to reflect more programming and computer based design, I was looking at game design and stuff like that. It wasn’t until I got in high school and I started taking the programming courses that I decided to go to computer science. And then when it came down to time to choose my major, I had gotten sick of the programming but I still liked the problem solving and working hands on.

[101-112] One big influence that I did have was my cousin. The way high school in my district worked was when you pick your classes for your freshman year of high school, you decide whether or not you want to go to the vocational school half day and then, after that first year, you can decide to go full day or still half day. My cousin, who is three or four years older than me, went to the same district I did. He went to the vocational school for computer design. He originally wanted to be a roller coaster engineer and I remember growing up and seeing all the things he was doing and I was like, “That’s really cool.”

[115-121] So, he was definitely one of the people who got me interested in the computer aided part of engineering, and he’s definitely the one who I think got me really interested in the design aspect and kept me centralized around that area. But otherwise, it wasn’t really people telling me to go here or go there. I had this idea from the get go and people would kind of just positively reinforce. If they asked what I wanted to do, I’d say engineering or computer science and they’d be like, “That’s a good profession.” Or, “I think you’d succeed there.” Or something like that.

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josh quotes

Josh’s Quotes #1

[25-31] So, I came back to engineering and I chose mechanical because of my like to be hands on and to have an end product to hold in my hand. My family was definitely very supportive of everything I did, and they’re the reason that I’m able to come to school today. But I definitely think it was my own interest and desires that led me to engineering. I think it was a lot of deliberation on what each profession means and what’s involved in it, and I found that engineering was the one that fit the bill for most of the things I enjoyed doing.

[146-151] I was like, “I want to design things because I know how things work, I enjoy doing math, I feel like I could succeed.” So, this is why I decided I wanted to be an engineer, and then I looked at schools. I found my university because I found schools based on location. I wanted to be independent from my family but I wanted to be close enough that if I needed to be there, or I needed to be with them, the opportunity was available.

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Josh’s Quotes #2

[220; 234-241] I came in as a mechanical engineering student. That first semester was very introductory into everything, college, engineering. It was mostly review: I had a chemistry course and I had Calculus I which I had already had in high school. So, there was a lot of repeat but I think they did that on purpose to transition you into college life, and it’s a different mindset obviously. But they started and gave us just a basic run down of what engineering was going to be. They split it up and gave us I want to say six or seven weeks in electrical discipline and six or seven weeks of mechanical discipline. The purpose is, if you decide you’re in the wrong one, you can switch without being behind in the spring semester.

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Josh’s Quotes #3

[245-257] I really enjoyed my classes in the fall. We built a robot, and we built a catapult completely from scratch to our specifications. In the spring, we got into specifically mechanical engineering. I had an intro to mechanical engineering course, and we did six weeks in the computer lab and six weeks in the machine shop where we designed, fabricated and assembled a soft blow hammer and a tumbler. It’s a plastic block with a metal swing arm on it and you can you just crank it endlessly; it’s like a little toy. That was to teach us how to deal with tolerance, to get pieces to fit together. They also, in the catapult project, put us into groups because the purpose of engineering is to learn to work in a group as well as doing things on your own. So, those definitely satisfied that curiosity of saying, “How can I make this machine make a piece of solid metal into some intricate design? And how can I transfer that skill into a different project and use it in this way?”

[258-263] So, I feel like that only increased my desire and I still wanted to be an engineer. The schooling, obviously as we go on, gets harder and becomes more of a workload. But, I still have that curiosity. We’re doing less hands on now than we are doing theoretical work, and I think the hands on is what keeps me interested. But the theoretical work does satisfy me to an extent because it’s still the satisfaction of solving problems or figuring out equations and finding the right numbers.

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josh quotes

Josh’s Quotes #4

[158-160] I will say though this last fall it did falter a little bit because I was having some trouble in classes and I started to question whether or not I should be here if I’m not able to succeed in this class.

[202-211] I went to some professors and multiple people told me, “You can breeze through this class.” One professor actually told me, “I wouldn’t care if you got a 2.5 in this class and just passed it barely because as long as you get the concept and applied them later, it’s not about whether you can pass it with flying colors.” I went with that mindset and continued. The homework format changed and the tests ended up being super simple compared to some of the homework problems and some of the things we were doing in class. So, I realized a high grade isn’t the only grade you can get. I also realized it’s a culmination of concepts, but as long as I get the ones that I’m there to master, that’s what the program was focused on teaching me at that time.

[160-161] I ended up getting the help that I needed and I ended up getting a four in the class.

[345-348] Also, I think I definitely have a good routine. I’m a very organized person in how I organize the things in my house and also how I organize my life. I’m very timeline oriented, I have Google calendar and I do put a lot of my things on there. That’s something that I’ve kind of always prided myself on, is knowing when I can do something.

[358-362] You kind of get a feel for what each assignment is going to take time wise. It’s about deciding how much time I’m willing to spend at once. So it works good for me, I know a lot of people have issues with their time management and I try to give recommendations where it’s due but it’s definitely manageable. I mean, I still have free time even being involved in the five or six organizations I’m involved in.

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