The semester so far

Warning: This post is a bit on the boring side... Just writing down my thoughts about the semester so far.

Can't believe I was in California again this past weekend. I'm so glad I don't have any plans this weekend. It's good to be able to catch up with work again. I'm really worried about all these projects that I have to do. All of my classes have some form of group projects and I feel like we haven't made much progress at all. Anyway, hopefully things won't get too hectic at the end of the semester.

This semester has been very fuzzy. I guess part of it is that we spent all of IAP somewhere else and didn't really get any time to adjust back to MIT life when school started. And all of my classes have long term projects instead of regular psets, so they seem to drag out forever. Spring break was another blur since I travelled to several states in the course of a week. I actually left before spring break actually started so it was just one continuous thing.

Let's see, let me write about my classes this term since I haven't talked about them much.

First, anthropology. I'm doing quite well in this class. I finished all the reading over spring break. Actually, I liked having some readings to between other pset. But whatever, very relaxing now that I've finished the readings. I just need to write 2 more reader responses, 2 more essays, and I'm done. Well, there's a final but that shouldn't be too bad. The class has been pretty interesting. Like linguistics, it's more scientific than I had expected. It's pretty cool to learn about cultures and trying to figure out people and their activities. I wish I had discovered this sooner. I think I would have enjoyed taking more history and anthropology classes. They're subjects that I didn't know much about in high school and therefore didn't explore them (or didn't know they existed) in college. Had I known how interesting they are, I probably would have done them instead of some other HASS classes I have taken. Maybe I'll have the chance to listen in on some classes in grad school? Would I have time?

Senior project design. This class is so much work! Way more than 12 units. They should either scale it back or make it 18 units. We have 3 projects. We're done with one of them but they're all so much work. Right now we're designing a vertical farm and building a bridge. A vertical farm is a building where you grow food in. So instead of growing stuff in the ground, you can grow it indoors. We're basically seeing how feasible it is to adopt such a food producing method and then making a design for one. The other project is building a 2'x10' footbridge that can carry 1 ton (2000 lb). We're in the process of finalizing our design - drawing and calculating stresses. We went to Home Depot today to look at some building materials.

Project Evaluation. They should just call this engineering economics. This class is all about money. I'm actually not too sure what's happening in this class. I always zone out in class... I really don't like looking at money and financing things. We're supposed to pick a major project and analyze financial stuff. Not too sure what's happening here.

Engineering Systems. We're supposed to be planning out a high speed rail system for Portugal. This is actually something that the country is interested in doing. Sounds interesting but we still haven't done anything concrete or analytical. Still on the writing about stakeholders stage. I think we're just going to end up making a lot of assumptions and our end product is going to turn out to be something fuzzy instead of something usable.

Steel. I'm taking a class on steel construction. The instructor is very interesting. He's an actual structural engineer and he brings in stories from work. The homeworks are a little hard since it's a grad class. But I don't mind. I actually learn a lot from this 2 hr a week class. It's making me rethink whether I only want to be a geotechnical engineer or possibly do something more structural related.