This semester is off to a really intense but cool start. During the first week back, all my clubs and other commitments wasted no time at all kicking back into high gear, even doing a little bit of extra work to make up for break. Thankfully, OCHEM and both of my electrical engineering classes have remained mercifully lab free and don’t start until next week, so that’s given me a little bit of time to breathe.
I also got to spend my first weekend of the semester in Seattle, which was super fun. It was crazy cold and snowy though. I have to admit, I felt pretty dumb getting off the plane in seattle in a sweatshirt… but thankfully I brought jeans with me. For some reason I still think west coast = california = warm, since that’s how we think of it in the midwest sometimes. I was not the only one caught by surprise though, as the entire city of Seattle seemed to be shutting down because people were snowed in and the roads were most definitely not cleared. It was one of the scariest taxi rides I’ve ever taken. I did think it was kind of funny though, how 2 inches of snow in Seattle = 2 feet of snow in Wisconsin.
While I was there I got to visit a friend who is going abroad this semester but is thankfully still home in Seattle for now, and I also got to reconnect with my cousins who I haven’t seen in 10 years! It was really cool to meet their kids, who mostly hadn’t even been born yet at that point. We had a snowball fight, Seattle vs. Wisconsin, and they definitely won!
Me and my little cousin - you can just barely make out the space needle over our shoulders
Anyway, I’m back now, and just minutes before writing this blog post, I finally set my class schedule in stone! I was sitting here with three extra units available and had too many choices of cool classes and I couldn’t decide! Eventually, I landed on what could possibly be the coolest class ever. I’m just going to copy/paste part of the class description so you can see for yourself!
- Mobile Apps for Medicine: This class will focus on developing mobile apps that interface and gather data from medical devices. Working with the USC Center for Body Computing under the Keck School of Medicine, we have access to various medical devices that are used either on or in the human body.
I’m super pumped to straddle the line between biomedical engineering and computer science and create software that really could impact people’s lives.
In addition to that, I’ve got a computer architecture class, which like all electrical engineering/computer sciences classes, blows my mind every day. We’re learning about assembly language which is the lowest level of programming we’ve seen so far, and today we started translating directions into straight up binary. So much control over the computer!
I also have a nice circuits class where we’ll get to build our own electric guitars at the end of the semester, and a biomedical engineering class where we learn about basically tons of different devices and how they work, as well as design considerations that were needed.
Finally, don’t forget Organic Chemistry! This class has a reputation for being a destroyer of lives (at any school), so we’ll see how it goes. I like chemistry in general (it’s part of why I’m a BME, not just an EE), and so far it’s been pretty easy/interesting, so I just hope that keeps up.
Aside from classes, I have RELAY FOR LIFE this semester, which you may know as the thing that takes up about 60% of my life in planning, so that’s really exciting! I can’t wait for the event to finally come around and you can be assured that there will be a full post about it when it happens.
Sorry this blog was super wordy – I’ve got a fun post planned for next week with lots of pics, so get pumped for that!
