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Today, I met with my advisor to go over my schedule for next semester. At this point in the current semester, my classes are reaching their most difficult stage, and everyone's probably a little bored with the routine. So, it's always pretty fun to plan out a new semester, that has the potential to be more exciting. I think that my Spring semester actually will be much more relaxing. During this Fall semester (traditionally the hardest semester for materials science), I had to take 6 classes, plus a seminar. None of the classes were *that* hard, but just having so many of them spread me pretty thin. I definitely recommend keeping that in mind when you choose your own classes someday! Still, I'm sure in the future it'll be good to know that the most difficult part is already behind me : ) . I took a lot of AP classes in high school, and I got some very useful AP credit from taking the exams. That means that this semester, instead of taking Modern Chem I and the lab that goes with it, I get to take my first Free Elective. I can decide if I want to go for a minor, or take a student taught course, or take something completely random (I have a friend that's taking an African Dancing physical education class). My advisor said that the two materials science classes I'll be taking are pretty difficult, so for this semester I should just choose something fun (as opposed to senior level Electronic Properties, which was what I was going to take). Here's my schedule so far:
Actually, the scheduleman site is linked to our IDs now, so if that doesn't work, let me know and I'll try to just post a picture of it, ok?
If you can see it, you'll notice some blank spaces. One is for my exciting Free Elective. The other space is for Physics II, which I will be taking at the University of Pittsburgh. Carnegie Mellon students are allowed to cross-register with Pitt for one class per semester. Most people use this for language, since Pitt has an awesome language department, but since Physics II conflicted with one of my materials science classes, I decided to take it at Pitt (instead of over the summer). Conflicts don't happen *too* often, but they are admittedly more common in materials science. Since there are only 20-30 people in each year of matsci, there's obviously only one lecture time for each class. Still, I'm pretty happy with my schedule, and am looking forward to a somewhat easier semester after Thanksgiving Break!
A group from my church is going to Rome over spring break this year, and I think that I'm going to be able to go! I'm so excited! I've never really gone out of the country before (I went on a trip to Canada when I was 12), so this is especially exciting for me. I think most of the trip will be centered around visiting Vatican City, but we will also be going to some museums and old buildings and stuff. The only downside is that it costs a lot of money (relatively cheap for a trip overseas, but relatively expensive for a college student). Between blogging and working at the lab, though, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. So, you can expect to see more frequent entries from me in the near future, and a week's worth of entries about Rome in the farther-away future! This week, we had SWE High School day, which I think went pretty well. A bunch of girls from surrounding high schools came and went to information sessions about the different types of engineering. All the professors teaching the sessions tried to do some kind of fun activity (I know in Materials Science they used the Scanning Electron Microscopes, and in Electrical & Computer Engineering they built some kind of circuit board thing). I helped sign people in, and directed them to their buildings. I got to see some of the girls from my high school, which was pretty cool. This must be a good time to visit campus, because I saw a lot of high school students here for the sleeping bag weekend around today. Sleeping Bag Weekends are definitely a really good thing to go to. If you haven't heard of them already (they're in the brochures all the time), you come to campus on Sunday, stay overnight with some freshmen in a dorm, and then attend information sessions or classes or whatever you want on Monday. I think they're good because they let you experience what the atmosphere on campus is like. When I was deciding where to go to college, I stayed overnight with students at most of the universities I was seriously looking at, and it really helped me make a good decision. My sister's a senior in high school (future music performance major), and she's coming to a sleeping bag weekend in a few weeks. The College of Fine Arts is actually letting her have a lesson with the guy she's going to be auditioning for while she's here, which I'm sure is a pretty good opportunity. So.. yeah, the point is, make sure you visit campus in some form before making a decision! If you are thinking about visiting campus, let me know if you have any questions about what programs are going on, and what kind of stuff you should do while you're here. And, as always, let me know what other stuff I should write about!
Today, me, my roommate Betsy, and my 3 Society of Women Engineers mentee people carved pumpkins! (The Society of Women Engineers has a mentoring program where they put freshmen with upperclassmen, and upperclassmen with graduate students. Because they were a little short on mentors, and because I already know some materials science graduate students from work, I signed up as a mentor. My mentees can ask me questions about school, Carnegie Mellon, materials science, internships, or whatever they want. Plus, we do cool stuff, like carving pumpkins). We took the bus to the Giant Eagle in Squirrel Hill to buy pumpkins, then carved them in the lounge on my floor. It went pretty well, except for one pumpkin that was as hard as a rock. We borrowed my friend's huge carving knife thing (he does some intense cooking, so it wasn't weird that he had a carving knife), but even that didn't work. We decided to hang onto the pumpkin, and see if it eventually softens up enough to cut. Anyway, after we finished carving the pumpkins, I decided to put mine in my window, since my window faces the street. We're not allowed to have candles in the dorms, so I borrowed the gadget that my boyfriend made in gadgetry. I'm not sure if I've mentioned gadgetry before- if not, it's a student-taught course (StuCo) that you can take on a pass/fail basis, for like 1 unit or something. Carnegie Mellon offers a lot of StuCos, on a bunch of different subjects- crafts, robots, gadgets, cooking, dancing, etc. In the gadgetry StuCo, you build your own electronic gadget. The gadget can be anything electronic- the TAs help you make it (often by finding already existing programs for you to modify). It's pretty cool, since you don't need to know anything about electronics or programming going in. Anyway, my boyfriend said that when he took it, he couldn't think of an idea, so he made this:
-thumb-200x150-1570.jpg) (It's a bunch of LEDs stuck to a circuit board. He can program it to flash in different patterns and stuff).
So, I used it to make an LED pumpkin:
(It changes colors)
Unfortunately, you can only really see it if the streetlight outside my room isn't turned on. But I still think it's cool!
Last Friday was midsemester break (we have Friday off, while they calculate our midsemester grades and such), so some of my friends and I went to Fright Night at Kennywood. I think I've mentioned Kennywood before- it's a pretty large amusement park that's about half an hour from Carnegie Mellon, with 4 or 5 roller coasters, but mostly family-type rides. During October, they close the kid rides and water rides and put up haunted houses for Halloween. We took the bus there (which was pretty straight forward). Student Dormitory Council had been selling reduced price tickets that were good for any night in October, so we bought tickets from them. They also have cheaper tickets at Giant Eagle, which was our back-up plan. The haunted houses mostly weren't too scary, but it was pretty fun. When I went last year, I thought one of the haunted houses was pretty scary. When we went in that house this year, though, the guy leading the group got lost, and we ended up walking around the outside of the house and back to the food court. We had to get back in the end of the line, and told the park employees how we mysteriously vanished, which really took away a lot of the scary atmosphere. Anyway, I had a lot of fun- I've been going to Kennywood since I was 6, so I think it's very awesome. One thing to remember if you go sometime is that it does get pretty cold. I was wearing 4 layers of clothes and a winter coat, and it was still fairly cold (it was also raining/snowing a bit, which didn't help). Another thing to remember in general is to program the number for a taxi company into your cell phone before you take the bus anywhere- the bus that was supposed to pick us up at 11:30 broke down or something, and never came. Another bus came just as we were calling for a taxi (2 hours later), but really it's good to have the taxi number just in case. The buses are fairly reliable, but it's good to be careful. Sometimes Student Dormitory Council also organizes buses to go (we couldn't go on that night), so you should look out for that. I'm pretty excited about Halloween now. Some people were selling pumpkins on campus today. I didn't want to carry one to lab, and when I went back for one at 5, they were gone... maybe they'll be back tomorrow. If not, on Friday my roommate and I are going to pick up some pumpkins from Giant Eagle, carve them, and put them in our window (since we face a main road). The only question is how we're going to carry pumpkins on the bus...
In other news, I got a 3.84 for my midterm QPA! I feel like this will probably go down by the end of the year, but I'm excited anyway! This has been a tough year, with 6 classes, so I'm glad that things seem to be turning out alright so far.
Hi everyone! I'm going to assume that if you chose to read my blog, you have at least a passing interest in Carnegie Mellon engineering, so I thought I'd talk about some of the cool things Carnegie Mellon students do in their labs (labs are usually my favorite part of my engineering classes). If you want to hear about a type of engineering not listed here, let me know!
Since people seemed interested in Carnegie Mellon robot stuff the last time I posted pictures, here's a link to a video that you might be interested in. My boyfriend's lab group made this robot for their Mobile Robot Programming class. The robots are given to them, and they program them to do something different every week. They can follow people around, avoid people, and go through mazes (sometimes they are allowed to keep track of where they are in the maze, and sometimes they aren't). I know hardly anything about the programming involved, but it seems pretty cool, if you're a computer engineer. If you're a mechanical engineer interested in robots (or any other type of engineer, I suppose), your best option would probably be robotics club, where they actually go into their lab and build the robots. We're doing electrical stuff in materials science right now too, which I think is really interesting. In my Defects lecture today, we spent about half an hour talking about the search for blue LEDs (they're harder to make than red or green, because the only material with an energy gap that corresponds to blue wavelengths is Gallium Nitride, which is tricky to work with). We're also doing a lab next week where we look at how the amount of point defects in a material affects that material's magnetic properties. I'm also going to be working on a lab this weekend for my Structures of Materials class. For the lab, we had to shine red and green lasers through sheets with different configurations of slits, and then trace the pattern it made on the wall. This is supposed to imitate the way electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction work (these are ways to image materials in order to determine the crystal structure). For our last lab, we get to use the big x-ray diffractometer in Roberts Hall (the materials science graduate building that has all the cool and expensive equipment in it). So, this lab is just kind of giving us an idea of what kind of math will be involved when we do actual x-ray diffraction. It's actually pretty unusual for undergrads to be allowed to use x-ray diffractometers (because they're quite expensive, and used by grad students all the time), so it'll help us all for internships when we can all put "trained in x-ray diffraction" on our resumes. Plus, "trained in x-ray diffraction" just sounds cool. The intro to mechanical engineering class (for freshmen) is also doing one of their main labs right now- they are building a mouse trap car. My boyfriend is actually in the class right now, since he switched from physics to engineering his second semester (and engineers are required to take 2 types of engineering). I think that most of the groups build their cars to have something like this design. A few groups always go for something different, but that's apparently pretty difficult, since the professor has some rule about all the potential energy being stored in the mouse trap and the gum bands (no springs allowed).
Hi! Sorry for the long lack of updates. We've been having a lot of trouble with our blog server, so none of us could post anything for awhile. Updates should be fairly regular, starting.... now!
Quite a while ago now, I went with my family (I'm from Pittsburgh, remember?) to Station Square and Mt. Washington. This is also somewhere you could go from Carnegie Mellon using the PAT buses. When I was a freshman, our RA took my floor there for dinner and to ride the inclines during one of the first weeks. Station Square is a bunch of (kind of expensive!) shops, in what used to be the main Pittsburgh train station. If you take the bus in from the suburbs surrounding Pittsburgh, you still usually transfer to another bus at Station Square. They do a "Station Scare" thing for Halloween, and sometimes there are outdoor concerts and stuff. There are also some "dancing fountains", which I think are pretty cool.
Hard Rock Cafe at Station Square
Fountains
From Station Square, you can walk to the inclines, which take you up Mt. Washington. I think I have mentioned them before, but if I haven't, the inclines are awesome! When Pittsburgh was still a steel city, the steel mill workers who lived on Mt. Washington would ride the inclines down the hill to go to work. Now, it's pretty much a tourist thing. There aren't many inclines around anymore, so if you do get a chance, you should go check them out. At the top of the inclines, there's a viewing platform, from which you can see the whole Pittsburgh skyline.
The incline station at the top of the hill
Viewing Platform
Pittsburgh!
*Note: I forgot to mention: If you live in the Pittsburgh area, and are thinking about going to the Society of Women Engineers High School Day here at Carnegie Mellon- you should go! I'm on the committee, and we've had a lot of the engineering departments and groups volunteer to do demonstrations and stuff. It should be pretty good!
Hi guys- I have been very busy lately! Carnegie Mellon is currently approaching Exam Week # 1. Most classes have 3 exams per semester, plus the final exam. Unfortunately, most of the classes end up covering the first third of the material by about the same time. By the second exam, they've spread apart from each other (as some classes get ahead and some get behind), but then by the end of the semester, the professors all try to crowd the third exam into the last 2 weeks before the semester ends and finals week begins. So, yes. I had a Chinese exam today, and I have a Differential Equations exam Monday, a Defects exam Thursday, one lab report due today, 2 lab reports due Friday, and a Thermodynamics exam next week. Luckily, most of my professors know each others' schedules and have extended the deadlines on most of our problem sets. Still, a lot of people seem to be adjusting to the shock period between "woo, we're at college!," and "EXAMS?!". So, just warning you guys now- life will be a lot easier for you during exams if you're already somewhat ahead on your regular homework assignments. The work load here can be intense, but it's best if you do a little bit every night (Note: Everyone you talk to here will give you this advice even though they probably don't follow it themselves. This includes me). Also this week was the TOC- Technical Opportunities Conference. A lot of companies send recruiters and other representatives to Carnegie Mellon to find summer interns (sophomores and juniors), or full-time employees (juniors and seniors). It's held in the University Center (in Rangos ballroom), and each company has a booth. You dress up in a suit, go to booths, hand out your resume, talk to the recruiters and receive free stuff with the company logo on it. If the recruiters like you, they'll ask you to come for an interview, usually sometime in the next few days. There's also the EOC in the spring- Engineering Opportunities Conference. I'm planning to go to that one, since I didn't go to the TOC (I didn't have a suit and apparently that's required. Note: Bring a suit to college!). I'm hoping to get a research internship this summer at another university (for the REU program, which has it's own application process- no confrences necessary), so the TOC isn't really a big deal for me. The summer before my senior year, though, I'd definitely want an internship, and I don't want my first time speaking to recruiters to be when I actually need them to hire me. So- EOC it is! It's a little weird thinking of myself and my classmates as actual adults looking for actual jobs. Some of the people look like professional businessmen when they're dressed up. I think that high school sets college up as The Major Goal- everything in high school was about how to get into college, how to apply to college, what to take in college, where to go to college. Now that I'm in college, I need to remember that there's still one more goal- figuring out how to get a career, a job, and I guess essentially a life. Crazy stuff!
In other news, I got my camera USB, and I'll try to take pictures of campus and the dorms and stuff, if you guys are interested? Let me know please! Also let me know if you want more info about jobs and stuff.
You've all heard of it. The media was crazy about it a few months ago, and it's supposedly sweeping through colleges (and high schools?) across the country. It'll probably be gone by the time you guys enroll, but in case you're curious, here are the details as they relate to Carnegie Mellon:
People started getting it about halfway through the first week that the freshmen were here. Most of these people were freshmen. This is probably because during orientation, the freshmen are encouraged to spend pretty much all their time in close quarters with each other. Since then, it spread to the upperclassmen, was strong for like a week, and then tapered off again. I've heard they're expecting a comeback in October, but there should be a vaccine by then, so hopefully it won't be too bad. Carnegie Mellon's health services set up a Swine Flu Clinic on campus, in one of the on-campus apartment buildings (Margaret Morrison). You can go there to get flu prevention supplies, or to get your temperature checked (the distinguishing characteristic of H1N1 is a fever). If you do have a fever, they quarantine you there until the fever's gone for 24 hours. Overall, it hasn't really changed life on campus all that much- there was initially a lot of freaking out, but that went away when people started to realize that not all that many people were actually getting it. Carnegie Mellon put hand sanitizer pretty much everywhere on campus, and started handing out disposable thermometers like crazy. Swine flu is something that my mom freaks out about quite a bit, but from what I've heard, the severity of illness seems to vary a lot- some people are quarantined for one day, some people are quarantined for 5. I think the longest I've heard is 7 days. Why am I bringing this up? My boyfriend was quarantined. So... I've been avoiding people, drinking fluids, taking my temperature every few hours, and basically just waiting for symptoms. Pre-med people have told me that not everyone who's exposed to the virus actually gets sick, so hopefully that will be the case for me :) It's been almost 3 days, and no symptoms yet, so I might actually be in the clear. Anyway... any worries about H1N1 (or parents with worries about H1N1) feel free to ask- after talking to health services, the clinic, and all my friends who had it (when I was trying to figure out if I was sick), I have quite a bit of information at my disposal!
Today, my Structures of Materials class went on a field trip! An actual genuine field trip just like the ones you go on in elementary school. In fact, this one was almost exactly like the ones I went on in elementary school, since it was to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (which is where all the Pittsburgh schools send their kids on field trips). Specifically, we went to the minerals and gemstones hall, which is pretty large. Structures is basically crystallography 101-: it covers how to determine crystal structure with x-ray diffraction or electron microscopy, the different types of crystal structures, and how these structures influence the properties of the material. So I guess our professor wanted us to see some crystals in real life before we started the class? More likely, he probably thought we needed a break from stressful problem sets. Whatever- it was nice to get outside and go to the museum with some awesome matsci people. They took us on a tour of the back rooms, and told us how they try to sneak educational information (about twinning and Miller indices and other crystallography stuff) into the gemstone exhibits, so it was somewhat more tailored to Carnegie Mellon matsci students than the average gemstone tour would be. You've probably heard this multiple times, but in case you haven't, the Carnegie Museums are free with your student ID card. Which means the cost of a yearlong membership was already included in your tuition so, you know, why not go use it? There's the natural history museum, which has dinosaurs, the gemstones, Egyptian stuff, arctic stuff, and I forget what else. There's also the art museum which has, you know, art. It has a really cool entrance hall that has classical Greek and Roman architecture (which I find more interesting than paintings and stuff). Next to these are the Carnegie Music Hall (where the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and sometimes smaller music groups play) and the Carnegie Library (the main library of Pittsburgh). These are all about a block from campus, across from Pitt's Cathedral of Learning and the Starbucks, with the giant fountain thing outside.
After our exciting field trip, I went to a back to school spaghetti dinner thing at the church I go to- the Pittsburgh Oratory (aka Newman Center). St. Paul's Cathedral is closer to campus, but it's a *cathedral*, so it's pretty huge, with lots of marble. Personally I prefer smaller churches. But anyway, if you're Catholic (or interested), both of these are in walking distance (and during orientation, people volunteer to show the freshmen where they are). A lot of Pitt and Carnegie Mellon students go to these, so they do try to make most things applicable to college students (which is different from my church at home, which had a lot of senior citizens). If you want more info, you can always ask me . St. Paul's. Note the largeness. Also, the marble.
In other news, I am going home this weekend for my birthday, so I will finally be able to get my USB cable for my camera (as well as the other 10 or so items I forgot to bring with me).
Today was my friend's birthday, so last night she invited a bunch of people to go to the Pirate's game to celebrate. I'm definitely more of a football fan than a baseball fan, but it was really fun! My camera is still without it's USB, but they took our photo when we got in the door, and here it is: As you can see, I'm wearing my Steelers jersey. I don't have any Pirates stuff, and I felt like I should support Pittsburgh with whatever materials I happened to have at my disposal.
If you haven't heard this already, the Pirates are terrible. The manager has a habit of trading off any players that become successful in return for "prospects." This makes the Pirates unusually financially successful, even for a baseball team, and also one of the worst teams around. I've heard that if we have a losing season this year (our 18th losing season in a row), we'll officially be the worst professional athletic team in history. Not baseball team, but professional athletic team of any kind. Which is pretty impressive, in it's own way. Not as cool as winning the Stanley Cup or the Superbowl (like the Penguins and Steelers), but still impressive. At the game we went to, we were playing the Cardinals, who are supposedly one of the best teams in the league. So, you know, we didn't go expecting to win. And we didn't. But, I love sitting in the stadium. The whole atmosphere of excitement is pretty cool, plus the stadium (PNC Park) is new and pretty nice. They play music and have pierogie races and music between the innings, which is fun. It was also both $1 Hot Dog Night and Free Hat night, so now I have a stylish Pirates hat for the winter. Anyway, I recommend going at least once, even if you're not a baseball fan. A lot of the freshman dorms arrange for groups to get cheap tickets during the first few weeks of class, so look out for that.
In other news, I looked inside the new Gates Center today. As Kelly pointed out, I'm not sure what the policy on taking pictures of the inside before it's opened is, so I didn't attempt that. It's interesting inside. They tried to make it very modern and artsy, which I think is funny because a lot of our older engineering and computer science buildings definitely were designed with only functionality in mind. Even the ones not made out of continuously poured concrete can't really be described as "artsy". The Gates Center did look pretty cool though, and will probably look less strange once people actually move in for real, and are there all the time. It has massive whiteboards in the hallways, anyway, which the ECE majors seem pretty excited about.
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