Hardest Class vs. Favorite Class

Strangely enough, most of the time my favorite classes are the hardest ones. I guess I’m just super nerdy, but I love the feeling of working really hard to learn something and finally feeling like you understand it! This semester, most of my classes are a lot of work, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy them! I’d say my hardest class this semester is EE301, my Linear Systems class. EE301 is one of the classes Electrical Engineers have to take to move into the Signal Processing specialization. At first, I thought the class wouldn’t be that hard, since it is an extension of EE200, which I took last year. But it’s amazing how much you forget over a summer! And this class goes into much more detail than EE200, which makes it a lot harder, but also a lot more interesting! It’s a lot of math, but it’s exciting because I can see how it applies to areas of engineering that I can identify with. I can tell I’m going to learn a lot from this class, but I learned the hard way this weekend not to procrastinate. Last night at 3:30AM when I was still working on a homework set for this class, I promised myself not to wait until the weekend to finish my homework again! (But, I’ve definitely promised myself that before and look how well that worked out…)

When I woke up this morning to work on homework again, I seriously wanted a cup of coffee this big.

This morning I wished I was this girl.

So why didn’t I do my homework Saturday? Football of course. And I don’t regret it one bit, but next time I’m doing my homework before the weekend!

During my homework marathon last night, I also went to the lab to work on a lab for EE201, my digital circuits class. Steve, another VSA, and I are lab partners for that class, and even when it’s a lot of work it’s always fun to work together. That class is my favorite class this semester. I love how logical it is, and although I have to spend a lot of time on labs and on the computer doing simulations, it’s completely worth it. Last night, Steve and I finished up a lab that uses digital circuits to take in three binary numbers and choose the middle one.

We were able to get the schematic done pretty quickly but – like always in engineering – it didn’t work right the first time. We tested it in Modelsim, and then looked at the results to try to figure out what was going wrong.

 

Testing the Middle Number Finder in Modelsim

I’m really looking forward to the rest of this semester! I love that in my classes this semester, I’m getting to design working projects. Hopefully I can get it all done without too many sleepless nights!