So the general happenings of nowadays:
New Classes
MIT Clean Energy Prize Competition
Flying
Other general stuff.
So classes. Here they are:
- Principles of Modern Biology - Just as it sounds. Normal biology class. It's hard, but I actually like my professor. He's a really cool guy. He tries hard to get to know the students. We have two parts to this class. On Tuesdays, I have two hours of lecture from Bram (my professor), and then three hours of lab, which is taught by Bram but more by Sadie, another professor. Sadie's not a great teacher. Really nice woman, but she doesn't understand the fact that some of us have only had a semester of biology in high school. Lab is pretty cool, but I wouldn't say I'm interested in it. We cloned something though this past lab. I'm not sure what it was. Bacteria maybe? But cool! I cloned something!!
- Electricity and Magnetism Theory - I had the option of being in the Modeling and Simulation section which would be implementing E&M Theory into simulations of cool situations. But I decided since I'm terrible at coding, and coding wouldn't help towards going for a mechanical engineering degree, and the professor in the Theory section was supposedly really cool, I switched into Theory. Every week we have a problem set due, so it's a pretty typical college class. The professor really is hilarious. She's Russian. Shhhh, but she brought in a Guiness to demonstrate an electrical effect with a can. She didn't open it, but still!
- Vector Calculus - Another standard class. Problem sets due every week or every other week. It's not too bad but it took me a while to integrate sin(pi*t) today. That was bad.
- Engineering of Distributed Systems - Same class as Mod Con last semester but just different people in the class. Same classrom. Same teachers. Although now we're doing a bit more complicated things. The lab writeups are sucky in general, but this pasts week was especially hard. Took two long nights of work, and I still only finished part of it.
- Principles of Engineering - A class which mixes electrical engineering with mechanical engineering. This is the cool class. First day of class we took apart printers/VCRs in groups and we tried to understand exactly how each thing works. There were some pretty amazing mechanisms in something as simple as a printer! We're not working with devices called PIC microprocessors, in which we write code in C and upload it to the microprocessor, and then that microprocessor will do whatever you told it to without any need for a computer connection. So for this class, there have been some pretty amazing projects that have come out of it. I'm thinking of creating an autonomous remote controlled airplane as my final project. Yup, you read that right. The sky is really the limit for this class. For past projects, go here...and I really encourage you to, there's some pretty amazing things.
So those are my classes. Definitely not as great as last year, but not too bad. 5 hours of biology on Tuesdays is a killer.
So the MIT Clean Energy Prize competition is a 200K grand prize competition in which you submit just the executive summary of a business proposal. The final document is due on February 26th, so it's really crunch time right now. We've split up into two teams but we're still working together. We have two ideas, but I really can't say here on the internet what the ideas are - first of all it's a competition - second of all we might patent one of our ideas. Anyways, it's a very time consuming thing, but we're making progress on it. And if you're reading this and you've helped on it (you definitely know who you are), here's a public shout out to you. THANK YOU!!!
Flying. I've only flown two times since I got back from the break. The first flight we just did sharp turns and slow flight (flying at 60 knots, full flaps). The second flight, which was yesterday, we went out to Fitchberg airport which is a small uncontrolled airport about 10 minutes away. We did two full stop landings. On the second landing, there was a flock of bird crossing the area just before the runway. I told Maurice (my instructor) and he was like don't worry about the birds. But then as we got closer I became more aware that they were right in my flight path. In the end, all of them got out of the way, but one came probably 20 feet right in front of my propeller! And he was going in the direction of the airplane! Ahh I hate stupid animals. Nothing happened, thankfully. Anyways, it was really busy in the sky. Oh and when we were pulling out of our spot to taxi to the runway, we had to wait for a single engine taildragger being towed by a truck with a firetruck following it. Wow. Turned out that it was a brand new airplane, they forgot to pull off something or remove something before the flight, and they ended up with a low oil pressure and high oil temperature warning - aka no oil fllow. Oops. Everybody was ok though.
Anyways - here's the shibang of it all. My instructor said that next time we'll be doing touch and goes at Hanscom (once again, it gets as busy as Logan), and then the next time, if I do well, will be my first solo flight! AHH!! Exciting!
Well, besides that things have been going well. I've been really busy lately, so I should go now. Went to the ABC party last night in Man Hall. Errr - Anything But Clothes party. That was tons of fun. Pictures of my escapades at Olin are on Facebook, I don't have time to upload them to here.
Bai!!
No comments:
Post a Comment