A long December

EDIT 1/09/09. So apparently this is my 500th blog entry. Wowsers! I've only been on this thing for over 5 years now. Wow, how time flies. Of course, my pace on this has slowed dramatically due to everything else in the world. (Myface, Spacebook, etc.) This site, however, will always have a special place in my heart.

*****

So I still don't have ANY grad school apps complete. I am so behind. I have no money left to apply, either. My GRE scores were not as good I had been hoping for. Things in that respect look bleak.

But this is the holiday season, so things are otherwise going really well. Awesome, I'll dare say.

We got a Christmas Tree for the first time in quite a few years, maybe 5? Not sure, but hoorah for Target employees who don't know the difference between the Noble Firs and the Douglas Firs (We got our 40 dollar tree for 20. Sweet!) We got everyone into decorating and stuff. Even some of my cousin's friends helped, which was nice.

How many times have people actually seen me this semester? I was for all practicality's sake a hermit up in the AME building. My first (and only) semester without any math classes had me stuck on the north side of campus most all the time. I rarely even knew what was happening on campus if it weren't for the paper. But, in some form, that all paid off. I got all A's in all 6 classes!

Fast rundown:

AME 400- Senior Lab (2 units). Made a final presentation of mechanical stress and strain on polymers. Got stuck making up the team memo, which I had never done, and got a 65% on that assignment for the whole team (OUCH!). Needed an 88% on the final project to get an A. I got 88.75, and most things in that class go by 1%, so (idiom) I made it.

AME 413A- Machine shop (1 unit). Made a hammer out of a brass block and an aluminum handle. Nothing fancy, but enough to get me an A for the class. So I was all wrapped up with that by Thanksgiving. Then, all of a sudden, a guy I know tells me my name is on the shop door as lacking an assignment. So I freak out and email the teacher about what the topic was. I was all apologetic and everything. He replies saying it was a mistake. I had an A. No worries. Whew!

AME412A- Senior Design. (3 units, as are the rest of my classes) I don't want to sound proud, but I think I'm the reason we got anything presentable done in that class. Since I haven't really been able to be that helpful in terms of being a Mechanical Engineer (our stuff is mostly technical, so we have 2 Electric E's and a Computer E on our team) and they've been busy with a lot of circuit designs and such, so I figured to make myself more useful as an information relay person. I told people the schedules we were meeting for classes and discussion sections, and I set up the outlines for us to do our final report (and on that part the other guys did A LOT of work- thanks, guys!). Our final presentation was shaky, as had our other presentations. I think I would've like to get the other guys more involved in their parts of the presentation, but they were busy on the circuits and stuff so a lot was pre-packaged by me and some of the others and it didn't flow as smoothly as it could've. But I like my team. I think we're working on some cool stuff. I am working directly and indirectly with 3 other people from my high school class who are also Engineering majors.

AME 352- The fucking easy third midterm, testing F = ma and T = Ialpha, was as easy as I had thought. I got 100, but the average was still in the 60's. As a last ditch effort to not fail half the class, the prof said he'd drop the lowest midterm and maybe the second lowest, too. Those who did well on the midterms would be exempt from the final. A huge relief to me. I finished a group project with two people, designing one of those back-and-forth grocery store coin-op rocking horses, except we made ours a rocketship with vertical acceleration and sound effects. Pretty fun, actually.

AME 446- Fuel cells was a pretty low level stress class to start with. The prof had no TA, unfortunately, so grading was extremely generous, fortunately. We finished with a brief PowerPoint presentation on an assignment we had to do and a take home final. Both were pretty straightforward. Except it was the last day of class, and I still had to present. And then the bell rang. So I rushed through mine, and apparently did well enough to get good grades on my content and analysis. The A grade didn't surprise me that much. I'm sure a lot of people got an A in that class.

AME 432- THE MONSTER. This one was giving me nightmares. The class average was 54% on the quizzes, and I wasn't doing much better at 71%. The last group project turned out to be extremely easy- like 20 lines of necessary MATLAB code and it was done- and that helped me and my group (the same two people from AME 352) boost our grades. Then came the dreaded final. It was on the last day of finals, and I had missed the last day of class lecture for my Teach For America interview- I should learn like on 1/22 if I am wanted anywhere- so everyone was nervous, cranky, and downright scared. One of the people on my group projects group was a 6th year senior who just needed to pass every class to graduate. (Brent, you remember Ashley from Number Theory?) So we all got together and studied. Then I drove her to her Yoga studio. She's nice, but she already has a boyfriend, and I don't think we mix in that kind of way. But then the test came, and it took everyone the whole 2 hours. A couple people gave up 15 minutes in and handed it to the professor (I hear the summer school version of this class is way easier). Strangely, I didn't feel too bad about it. I knew what was being asked on every question, and I tried my best to explain in what ways I knew how. We got to use a cheat sheet, and I was worried that mine wasn't filled out very much, but I rarely needed to look at it anyways. I saw a lot of people shaking their heads and making gun blowing out their brain gestures with their hands. Somehow I got 88.5% on that sucker. Class average was 45% or 42% if you include the people who never went to class but were officially still on the roster. So I was ecstatic, but unsure on whether that would be enough to be A material. I mean some people had been averaging 90% on those quizzes, so I had my work cut out for me. But, alas, I got a A. And Ashley graduated.

Hey, what happened to that "Fast rundown"? Apparently it got run down by a much slower one. How would that happen? Maybe the fast one was careless and not paying attention.

So now it's Christmas season. The smell of pine tree fancies my nose. My mom got me an awesome T-shirt with an obscure character from a show about puppets. I just wish I could tell what he has in his mouth. And I got Rock Band for Wii. So if you want to come over, just let me know! I don't think I'' be doing any kind of New Year's event like I did last year. The projector is still dead. Anyone else got anything going?

A picture of the awesome amphibian

And this year's inside joke: "Immigrant Song"