Hands down my favorite class this semester is my ITP 215 class. It’s a 3D Modeling, Animations and Special Affects class. The best part is this class actually counts toward my major and is not just a free elective. As an engineer you have to take your typical technical electives, but specifically as an Industrial and Systems Engineer (ISE), I also have to take ITP/IOM electives. So this cool class counted as my ITP elective. I honestly chose this class because it seemed like it would be kinda cool. However, on the first day I was so intimidated. When the professor showed us examples of the mini movie clips that we could be doing by the end of the semester, similar idea to Pixar though not nearly as high quality, I felt like I was totally out of my league. At first I thought that this was more a class for animation majors because I had no absolutely no experience in this kind of stuff. But after the first week or so of slowly learning how to use the program I got the hang of it. Also, because I’m a student I can download the program onto my laptop off the internet for free (one of the best perks of being a student is that you get to download all kinds of programs for free), which means that now I’m going to be spending all my time doing my ITP homework and neglect my other homework because it’s so much fun now! What’s great about this class is that even though I had no experience whatsoever with animation, I was still able to pick it up and now it’s pretty easy to do. (Above are some pictures of my ITP project from the first week to give you an idea of what we get to do.)
On the flip side my, hardest class this semester is going to be my Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism class. I believe all engineers have to take at least two semesters of physics. I actually took Physics I and Calc III over the summer which I would highly recommend if you don’t have a job or internship to do during the summer. It is so nice to have all my pre-requisite math and science classes out of the way after this semester. Although, Physics I was actually a lot more like what I did in high school, mostly math problems, Physics II is much more engineering related. The good thing about physics is that a few of my friends are in my class so we’ve already got our study group set up to work on our homework together. I’ve also been to my professors office hours a couple times already and he’s very patient with me. So although this is definitely going to be my hardest class, I have a lot of resources already for helping me get through it.
