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Tchuck’s Quotes #16

[363-385] So, he actually has this policy, but this is the one thing that I’ll give him credit for. He handed out a note cards and his idea is he wants you to have […] I don’t even know how it works, 100%, because I don’t personally do it and I don’t really know if anyone else utilize it at all. But, you write on the index part, I’m not sure we’re supposed to put it. But then you just ask him a question on the next card and in case you guys don’t want to ask him in class, basically. And then he’s going to address the next class, which I think is good idea. I think people utilize it maybe once or twice because he would say, “Okay, in this card I got asked, here’s the answer.” Because he would tell everyone, “Because obviously, if one person is thinking it, maybe multiple people are thinking it and the person just didn’t want to ask in class. Fine. I agree with that.” My point being no one utilizes it now. And some people ask questions in class and the number has just consistently dwindled and dwindled as the semester goes by. Not to mention the fact that, when you ask a question, he’ll try to explain it, but he also doesn’t necessarily explain in the best way. And I also think that, he isn’t acknowledging the lack of understanding in stuff that we’ve learned as biomedical engineers. Because obviously, there’s the senior who literally already know everything. But then, besides literally those four or five seniors, the rest of us are all junior biomedical engineering students. And I know everyone else in my class because I had all classes the last semester. So, I’m on the same boat as them because, the only other experience we really had in terms of circuitry and stuff, was our efounds, was our electrical foundation class the last semester, which, also wasn’t that good and did not prepare us very well at all. So, between that and then this guy also just not managing it well, it’s just been a very bad foundation.

[388-405] The guy for electrical foundations, he, I don’t know. Again, I’m going to say he wasn’t a good teacher. I mean, he’s helped with the ascent which I’m not going to fault him for, but it did make things a little bit harder. And then, not to mention the fact that, he would also basically just come in and just, write literally pretty big circuits on the board and then just go through the problems. Which again, I’m not going to say that that’s not the worst way to go do circuits basically it’s you just actually, go do them. But that’s basically all that he did for the most part. And also, we would literally spend a lot of time writing down the circuits and not be able to listen to them or not be able to follow what he’s doing. So, we’d be trailing behind him the whole time. And we told him this because he actually had a mid-semester evaluation. So, some guy came in, he left the room, he asks us these questions, whatever. We all spoke honestly, everyone ripped into him a little bit and then, he really didn’t change at all after that still, for the most part. He mentioned, I think, not even the class after that, but two class after that. He brought it up a little bit at the beginning of class, and then, he didn’t really change much of the structure though, which is a little frustrating.  But, yeah. That’s why I feel I don’t necessarily have as good of a basis in, I guess, circuitry as I could have.

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Tchuck’s Quotes #17

[678-685; 76-80] Overall, the study groups really helped me in terms of the couple of hot points that were my exam grades. So, that was good. I mean, yeah. I will say that, not even group, just friends in general definitely helps with the hot points I would say. Just, find people and talk to people. My roommate and me talk about stuff all the time because we’re literally there, 24/7, which also is just another big change in how kids […] Now I’m home and I’m around my whole family, which is great, although and sometimes it’s not. But, it’s just a completely different, again, environment situation. So, just got adapt a little bit. However, I think not being on campus is definitely going to hinder me because I do think that being on campus, especially with my roommate that was an engineer, as well as being around other engineers all the time, definitely helped me navigate engineering

[643-667] Now that I’m home, fortunately, one of my friends, he’s my friend from high school that’s also doing biomedical engineering, who I also have all my classes with this semester still, he lives like, five, 10 minutes away. So, maybe not necessarily now because all the shit is going on, but relatively in the future maybe we can get together and work on stuff. There’s also plenty of people that I can just FaceTime or text and stuff and basically get help with or help out or just talk to. Because, again, I think that’s the biggest difference because I think that, I will still be able to stay on top of my work. I’ll have literally nothing to do. I won’t even be able to leave the house. So, obviously, I’m going to be on top of all my work.   I think that just the biggest thing is probably the, not the social, but I guess the, study groups thing. I do think that genuinely helped a lot. And also one of the things that we’d figured out for orgo would be we all take the quiz together, because, the way that it works is, when someone’s missed it, then you get all the answers for the quiz. So then, you have to game the system a little bit. There’s just a lot of little things and, I’m just being completely honest with you because, if you’re going to give us that situation, we’re all smart kids, we’re all going to take turns, we’re all eat the one […] We don’t even do bad when one person does that, because we all worked together on the problem. We’re still all doing the quiz, we’re just doing it all together so that way it doesn’t affect our grade. When, okay, so we all got four questions wrong, but guess what? We all could have gotten them right if one person is submits it. And like, “Okay, I’d rather have the grade boost and I’ll eat the one week you eat the next week, whatever.” We’re still learning on the material. But, yeah. I think other people are also trying to set up that type of stuff again too. So, I do think a lot of it’s just going to be trying to still, consistently do what we were doing, just obviously, adapting to the new situation that we’re in now.

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Tchuck’s Quotes #18

 [909-922] This summer I’m not doing anything, as of right now.  Ideally, I’d like to get an internship. I got on a phone interview with someone but, I don’t know. From what he told me, he said that, I seem too technical because, I think the specific position was for, basically, I don’t know. To put it really, really simply, like ordering types of drugs. But, it also had to do a little bit with getting with the manufacturer and looking at prices and stuff. A little bit more to the business side of things of which he said that, my background was a little bit too technical, he thought probably. So, then I didn’t end up getting that one. And then, I applied to a bunch, I think Kenmore’s I got a call back from them. But then, again, nothing happened there either. So, yeah. It’s been a little bit of a frustrating process, but I’m still working on it right now. Don’t know if anything’s going to end up happening. Don’t really want to go back to the warehouse this summer though, so maybe I can find something else, but we’ll see.

[519-541] Once I graduate, I’m considering graduate school. I’m literally talking to my professor tomorrow, because I have to pick my classes on Monday for next semester and, I have to figure out what I’m doing. Because basically there’s a 5-in-1 and one program offered at my institution. And so, there’s two different versions of it as well. There’s one with research which I would continue take or I have to take clinic my senior year no matter what. But then I would continue doing whatever we should have been doing in clinic, my year after that. And then have a thesis at the end of that. And then I’d get a masters in biomedical engineering or there’s a track that’s not research. I would still have to do the senior year of research, but then, the year after that I wouldn’t do any more research and I would just take graduate classes. And then it would count as a master’s in engineering with a specification in biomedical engineering. That’s just what the degree is called. The one that doesn’t require research, I don’t have to apply to and I probably could just do if I wanted to. And then the other one I do have to apply to, but I was already talking to my professor and she seems all for […] Recommended me for it. And I would probably be able to do it. It just a matter of whether or not I want to do it, that’s the only issue.  Because I’m not sure how big of a fan I am of research because it definitely is frustrating. And it tests your patience a little bit. But I would also, like I told her, because in theory, I’m still going to take […] The way it would work is I would take graduate level courses next fall, next spring and then I think, that summer, fall and spring. And then that summer I would have to take classes so I could do it in the extra year. I’d have to take classes that summer and then, finish up like in fall and spring, with whatever on the class that I needed.

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Anna’s Quotes #8

[35-44] While I was abroad visiting family, a very I would say life altering incident occurred that really put me into a bad mental state. And I didn’t start dealing with it until I got back from my trip because when I was there, I wasn’t about to let it ruin the only time I saw my family in eight years. So, I deeply suppressed that, moved on. But then when I got back, I was really not feeling it. I wasn’t doing my homework or going to class. I started smoking cigarettes, and it was not good. Very, very not good. I basically stopped caring about school, and I let this one extracurricular project that I was doing, it’s a LiDAR project, I let that fall to the wayside, and we are no longer doing that project.

[225-232] Oh boy. Up until the point where we stopped, we had basically conceptualized the idea. And we knew what we wanted it to do and how we wanted it to do it. And we had bought parts, like a Raspberry Pi and wire strippers. And we found the resources that we would need to assemble our design. So, we checked out the machining lab on campus. But then, it all kind of fell apart from there. We got about half the things we needed and then we couldn’t really decide on a power source. And all of us were busy with classes and there was nobody really being like, “Come on guys, we can do it.” So, we didn’t do it.

[45-47] I think that is entirely my fault because I was the sort of rally for that group and the leader of it. And when I stopped making people do things, things stopped getting done.

[48-54] Also, I withdrew from a class because I couldn’t handle five classes at the same time. And I couldn’t handle waking up early and my sleep schedule was absolutely terrible. I was also in some trouble with two of my friends because we had a bit of an argument. So, I was unsure of the friendships, so I was really not good. The only highlights through that period of suffering were a couple of parties I went to where I saw my friends. And Valentine’s Day. I made Valentines for everybody. That was nice.

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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’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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Anna’s Quotes #12

[330-337] I got to see another side of my systems programming teacher, because I was a TA junior, basically. An in-class assistant for Python programming labs this past term. And he was the course coordinator. So, he would run a couple meetings updating everybody on what’s going on in the class. And he’s really just a normal human being and hilarious, and awkward, and very different from his in-class professional persona. And I love seeing the personal sides of the professors. Beyond that, I don’t know. Just all of the teachers that I’ve had this past term have been really nice and they want to share their knowledge with you.

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Anna’s Quotes #13

[175-182] I also took programing class, dynamic systems and stability, and Signals and Systems 2. I quite liked that class. The professor taught exclusively through writing things on the board, but he would always prove it. And you could tell in the way that he talked about the math that he really thought it was beautiful. And when a professor is enthusiastic about their subject, it just makes it so much easier to be enthusiastic about.

[183-193] And him not requiring you to turn in the homework was a definite bonus. And I was taking another class. What class was I taking? Let me check, because I do not remember. Okay. I was taking probability for engineers. That was one of the classes that suffered the most from me not wanting to do work because it had a constant weekly cycle of big homework sets due. And he graded it very rigorously and required attendance. All things that would help me learn the material if I didn’t have a backup of my friends who had taken the course last term and who helped me with the homework and things. So instead of paying attention in class, I just banked on Francis knowing how to solve probability density functions and things. I basically did the minimum amount of work in that class that I could, and my grade reflects that. It was tough

[210-218] So, I love math. Because if you have the basis to understand it, it turns into almost like a story. It builds off of itself and becomes really, really useful. And my teacher did a great job of leading us from one subject into the next, and proving it to us. The intermediate steps where he was like, “Well you know the Fourier transform that you’ve been doing this whole time, it’s actually much easier if you do a Laplace transform.” And here’s how we get from there to here. And the transitions from subjects and the way he really cared how they interacted, that was super helpful. Because other teachers will just jump from topic to topic and not explain how they’re related or show you the story.

 [55-58] But things started getting a little bit better, started being able to handle it. And part of that was I made a new friend whose name is Oliver, and we got along really well and were able to talk about our problems. And that definitely helped.

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Anna’s Quotes #14

[236-243] I met Oliver because we both spent an obscene amount of time at the library. So, I would always see him around and he would always see me around. And then one day we figured out that Francis who’s my friend, was also Oliver friend. Beautiful. So, we hung out in the library a couple times and then I was like, “Hey, I’m going to actually the Free Library. You want to come?” So, we went on a decently long walk over there. We checked it out. I got really excited about all the books. And we just had really good conversation and then we were friends.

[78-88] The incident kind of really messed with me. The things that did help were talking to my best friend who has gone through similar experiences, and reaching out to people who I know care about me. But the pivotal moment that turned me from just really super messed up to starting to be okay again was Oliver encouraged me to tell my parents what happened. And I feel like sharing that with them made me feel less like it was my burden and more like it was okay to talk about. And, I don’t know. I think the only reason I didn’t completely fail my classes is because I have friends in them and they would always be like, ” Anna, did you do the homework?” And I’d be like, “Oh, I guess I got to do the homework.” That sort of thing. Yeah. I don’t really know what else to say about that. Still working on it.

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