Annndddddd it’s been a while! I spent 8 months in DC doing an engineering internship. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to write about my adventures in DC at some point! I had a lot of fun, but it’s definitely good to be back in Southern California! Here’s a pic of me last spring at the cherry blossom festival in DC:
The transition from working 40 hours a week back to school has been interesting. At first it was difficult. I was use to coming home and doing whatever I wanted. As long as I had put my 8 hours in, I didn’t have to take any work home. School on the other hand is completely different! There’s always too many things to do and not enough hours in the day to get them all done! After nearly a month back, I’m really enjoying the college lifestyle though. I only have classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, which is great. Wednesdays are long (11 hours) but knowing that my weekend starts at 9:30 PM on Wednesday night really helps me get through the day!
Although I only have classes two days a week, I’m still taking 6 classes. They’re all towards my major, and I have 5 upper level AME classes and my second Writing class to finish up. Next semester isn’t going to be easy either, but I knew that I would have a difficult senior year after taking no classes last semester during my co-op!
Now on to my hardest and my favorite class. I’m debating whether AME 451: Linear Control Systems, or AME 404: ‘The Matlab Class” is more difficult. Linear Control is hard because, well, after 4 weeks of class, I still don’t know what a linear control system is. All i know is last week redid Laplace transform. By ‘redid’ I mean that I remember absolutely nothing about Laplace transform. I do know there are a lot of these graph/charts involved too:
AME 404 is also difficult for me because my previous experience with Matlab is…let’s just say I had trouble opening the program. On the other hand, our TA is now holding discussion sessions every Monday night, and I’m going to them, which is making doing the homework a lot easier! Last week I did it by myself!!! (I may have asked some classmates a few questions…)
My favorite class is AME 441: Senior Projects Lab! After much ‘discussion’ with my professor, he has allowed my partner and I to build both a carbon fiber and fiberglass guitar and to test the acoustics of these guitars. At first, I was very nervous for this class because a lot of the optional projects that the professors had come up with were very theoretical, and I knew I did not want to do these. My internship was very hands on, and I knew I wanted to continue down that path! My partner and I wrote up our proposal, and we just got approved yesterday! On a visit to the undergrad fabrication lab, we found out that a student had made a carbon fiber guitar a few years back! Molds already exist, making our project way more cost effective and a lot less time sensitive. At this point, we are just waiting for the materials to come in so we can start building!
So far, senior year is off to a great start! I’ll keep you updated…Hopefully, the updates include a picture of a guitar that looks something like this!
