The Gray Underside of My Shininess

I know I make it sound like college is all fun and no work, but the truth is that I work hard. I study a lot. I spend way too much time on lab reports. I assume that most of you would bet bored to death of this blog if I wrote about studying and homework, and I'd rather write about the random fun and funny stuff that happens because I spend the rest of the day contemplating the grand mysteries of the universe that I'm trying to stuff into my brain. So yes, I do work. I do a lot of work. However, sometimes, the work becomes repetitive, tedious, and occasionally boring, and I don't wish to submit you, my dear readers, to the same torment I (mostly) willingly put myself through.

This semester is the one with the duller, theory-filled classes that are prerequisites to the fun classes I can start taking next semester. It's not that the classes I'm taking aren't interesting, because they are, but I'm kinda done with endless analysis of stress-strain curves and triple integrals and assorted matrices just to explain why something breaks when you pull on it. I do have a lab (albeit on Friday night) where I actually get to break stuff, which makes it all a little bit better.

Right now, midterm season has begun, which means late nights shivering by the harsh glow of an LCD screen locked away in a deep dark cave, never to be seen again by man or beast. Or maybe just never be seen by any of the people I call friends or acquaintances. On top of that, I'm getting into the whole job search thing early this year (and the huge school-wide career fair is this Tuesday) so I'm also trying to figure out what I actually want to do with my life, or at least next summer. Bechtel was a great experience, but I want to try something different before I decide to stick with construction. So there's resumes to tailor and cover letters to write too.

Unusual fun stuff that happened this week:
ESPN College Game Day came to campus. I slept in.
I finally got to Pima Air and Space Museum because I have a friend who works there. That was pretty damn cool. They have a full 787 out in the yard, and a shard of moon rock inside one of the hangars.
I played some pretty intense Foosball with my Religious Ed kids - and got handily beat.
I got a new favorite class at the rec - Body Combat. However, I made the mistake of going on a two-ish mile run before a class that was advertised as intense cardio, and wound up really dehydrated. Oops.

And that's really about it.
Check next week sometime between Thursday and Sunday (but not on Friday) for the next thrilling installment of my life and times.

Getting Shot

Yesterday, I was taking a break from studying, sitting and reading a book at my semi-secret spot near the infamous acid green turtle pond, and some guy comes up to me.
"Hey," he says, "I'm Mike. I'm teaching a journalism class, and I was wondering if you'd let me shoot you." I gave him a look. "I mean, I'm trying to teach my students about different video strategies. Do you mind if I take some video?"
I said okay, and I kept reading my book, as per instruction, while Mike monkeyed around with his video phone. I can only imagine how I looked. My short hair was sticking straight up - I had gelled it earlier, but had been playing with it, so I now looked like a poorly drawn manga character. I was wearing an ironic t-shirt and messed-up Bermuda shorts, and was slightly slouched over my latest used-bookstore pop-psych acquisition. My bare feet were crossed in front of me on the bench, scarlet nail polish chipped and sweaty band-aids falling off. My beat-up pseudo-Vans were on the bench beside me, socks haphazardly tucked inside. I can only imagine I looked like the most awful wanna-be hipster in existence.
Mike started taking video, moving from right in front of me, to behind me, to practically in a tree, to the side, and then took some artsy shots with my shoes in the foreground, and then some looking over my shoulder. I was trying really hard not to giggle, so my face probably looked kinda funny too. He filmed for about 10 minutes, said thank you, then walked away. I can finally say that I have been filmed by a professional, and I'll get my 15 minutes of journalistic fame.

(Side note - the book was Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. The ideas are interesting, but it's somewhat disjointed.)

Other than that exciting adventure, there's not much to report. Midterms are coming up faster than I would like. I'm learning a lot about things that I've never thought about before, like why metals break at 45-degree angles, how to solder, and why plastics in airplane structure are not the best idea. The percentage of females in my classes has dropped from around 20% to around 15%, which was to be expected since the biomedical engineers now have a separate track.

As for this year's Rube Goldberg machine, we're opening and closing an umbrella in a Blazing Saddles-esqe  Old West Saloon. We have floors and a wall, and the first step is going to be putting a cowboy hat on a peg in the wall. It's all so exciting. I'm looking forward to see how the rest of it turns out.

I'm doing okay. I'm not dead yet, and the chances of survival look good. I'll keep you posted.

Singing in the Rain

This is me not coming home from a football game (we won, if you were curious).This is me, homework-less for the long weekend and looking forward to maybe, just maybe, getting out a little. This is me not getting drenched in the torrential downpour of Tucson monsoon rains that seem to start up every time I step outside, and in turn, not getting sick. This is me, a few hours after I had to go outside, swinging my umbrella and failing to tap dance in the puddles in my thick flip flops, gaining some strange looks from passers-by, and inexplicably getting my shorts wet.

What did I learn from this strange adventure today? I learned that the best way to get attention while walking from the library is to unabashedly loudly sing Gene Kelley's greatest hits while making a mess and not wearing a red shirt on game day. Guilty. Not sorry.

Classes, overall, are going quite well. We're still in the review phase, though if I have to hear about how to add vectors one more time, I might just leave. I have a class in which my high school statistics are finally relevant, which is good because the professor doesn't speak English well. I made the egregious error of signing up for a Friday night lab, so I still have that to look forward to. We're doing something with soda cans.

Most of the stuff I've been learning this year, both in and out of the classroom, is the effect of stress on bodies. I've been trying to get out and exercise - run when the sky isn't falling, do yoga at the Rec, and stuff like that. I feel nowhere near as good as I did over the summer. but college food will do that to a person.    

I am juggling a lot, but after the first week, it doesn't seem like this semester is going to be the hell I was promised that it would be. I'm actually looking forward to going to my 8 AMs. I will survive, and come out with a greater knowledge of materials, math, and fluids.

Third Time's the Charm

For a recap of my summer internship, see the previous post.

After 10 days at home, ten weeks in Washington, and another 5 days at home, I'm back in the dirty T. That's right - school's started again, and I'm an upperclassman. Time flies, does a few loop-de-loops, and smacks your face before you know where to look. I didn't even get to really unpack before I had to go off again. But I did get a chance to cut my hair. No, it's not just tied back.

Looking forward: I've been told by pretty much everyone that junior year is hell. It's already been a bit of a mess because of a bit of a paperwork mix-up and a few extremely boneheaded moves on my part, but most of that mess has been cleaned up and worked out. I haven't even gotten to the academics yet.

A primary issue this year will be stress - the mental and the physical. This semester, my classes are about materials and how to determine their properties. So my classes look like this:
MSE 331R - Fundamentals of Materials, or, Why Polymers/Plastics Are No Good For Most Things
AME 300 - Instrumentation, or, Why Your Thermometer is Wrong
AME 301 - Engineering Analysis, or, The Math You Should Have Learned but We Didn't Teach You
AME 331 - Fluid Mechanics, or, An Extremely Simplified Introduction to the Way Water Moves
AME 324/CE 215 - Properties of Materials, or, This is How You Break Things (and there's a lab!)
MATH 322 - Mathematical Analysis for Engineers, or, AME 301 Plus Theory

I am doing a lot, but I can handle it. I know that I've set myself up for an 8th Circle of hell, but I can do it. (On the other hand, maybe I'm just lying to myself). On top of that, I'm treasurering for the Rube Goldberg Club, staying active at Newman and with SWE, and got suckered into being an Honors Mentor (though I'm kinda just doing that one for the free food). I have this awful problem where I can't say no to things I'm interested in, regardless of time commitment, but somehow, I always make something work.

Yes, I'll be in hell, but stress is part of the job description. I've got some friends, some study buddies, and some enthusiastic (if heavy-accented) professors, so I'm going to knock it out of the park.

I'm feeling like I'm descending into the Pit right now, but I know that I'll find my Virgil and my Beatrice and get out alive. I don't think that I'll need to abandon all hope, but there's no doubt that this will be a difficult year.

Internship in Perspective

Sorry for the long wait between posts, but I haven't had a ton of time to breathe.

TL;DR - yes, I HAD A GREAT EXPERIENCE.

I l earned a lot over the summer. I learned things I can put on my resume, like how to read a P&ID (piping and instrumentation diagram) and how to use MathCad. I also learned things that can't go on a resume, like how to get around in a city where you need a car without a car and how to productively bug people. There's also the ever present, extremely ambiguous leadership skills, communication ability, and public speaking that you can pull out of almost any experience, but all joking aside, I learned a lot about those, too.

The last couple of days were slow. I got my performance review, gave my report out again, and got to talk to my lead a bit. The powers that be told me that I did a great job and that I would be welcome back next year - a good finish. My group took me out to pizza lunch on my last day. The very next morning, I flew home - uneventfully. I can say that I had (non-coffee) Starbucks in Seattle (Airport).

Some of my fellow interns who are local to the area finagled a deal where they could stay on through the year. The company wasn't willing to pay for my commute, so that fell through for me.

Overall, I learned a lot about what it means to be an engineer, to be accountable for your work, to not know everything. I met a ton of fantastic smart people, and saw how many different functions are needed to make a project progress.

Outside of work, I got to go paintballing and tubing for the first time. I got to see the Columbia River. I got to experience a bit of the small (okay, small-ER) town feel. I got outside a lot, and ate healthier in the past two months than I had been in the past two years. I got through a TV series (Heroes - I would recommend), and figured out how to get around in a new neighborhood.

So, yes, my summer was awesome. Thanks to everyone who helped get me there1

It's All Nuclear

Here's something I've experienced here in the Washington Tri-Cities area that I definitely won't experience anywhere else - the whole town (okay, three-ish cities) was built on and still mostly runs for one reason - the Manhattan project and its aftermath. For those of you who don't know, the Hanford Site, which is outside of Richland, was the place where the first full scale nuclear reactor was built and was where the plutonium for the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki was produced. Building this reactor was a massive construction project that was completed in record time with almost complete secrecy which wiped out a lot of the farms and the Native American territory that was there before World War Two. A lot of the structures that were built then still exist out in the middle of miles of scrub-brush-filled desert. And of course, there are the tanks full of 40 million-odd gallons of nuclear waste out there, which I am helping to work to clean up.

But here's the thing - even in town, you cannot forget the town's legacy. For example, Richland High School's mascot is the Bombers. Streets are named Atom, Einstein, Innovation, Leslie, Groves, Fermi. Most non-Bechtel people I've met are from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which helps with processing waste, or CHM2Hill, which manages the tank farms. Most people seem to be pro-nuclear power. I even went to a museum about the geology and history of the place, where they had an exhibit on vitrification where I could point out exactly what I was working on, which was undoubtedly very strange and very cool. Honestly, I'm a bit worried that once all the waste and stuff from the Manhattan Project is cleaned up, there won't be much here afterwards. On the other hand, it is definitely awesome to see that what I am working on has local and historical significance.

Work is going very well. There have been some exciting moments where I've seen stuff I've been working on has been used at the plant and to make important decisions in town. I did some work on a project for my manager that got presented to some of his bosses, and I became the work-off curve queen. Only problem - my manager just got transferred to work on another building, so I'm going to have to start all over with the new guy, who seems nice enough.

I also did my report out - my final presentation - last week, even though I've still got a while left to go. It went well - I got the most laughs, and I think I impressed upper management. I was slightly blindsided by a question about how much force it takes to haul a space shuttle on the back of a Toyota, but other than that, it went great.

This is probably one of the best places I could have interned because asking questions and being open to answering questions, regardless of position or ability, is highly encouraged. This attitude is important enough that there are even a lot of acronyms associated with it (SCWE*, anyone?), because, on a government job, anything important has an acronym.

I am definitely having a great experience here, and am not really looking forward to going back to school. It's nice only having to focus on a few things at a time, and having everyone actively on the same page working to succeed. Honestly, I'm a different person here than I am allowed to be at school, which is nice. Also, I've heard from pretty much everyone - junior year, especially in engineering, is hell. It's also nice not to have to worry about monsoon rains.

I will be returning to Tucson in a few short weeks, but I still have some time to have a good time here.

*SCWE - Safety Conscious Work Environment - as part of a nuclear safety and quality culture (NSQC), an open work environment where people are encouraged to ask questions and point out potential safety issues without fear of retribution. Opposite of a "chilled" work environment. Yes, I had to get training for this.

Hoists and Cranes and Robot Arms - Oh My!

One of the weirdest things about this internship is not something I even considered going in, and it's simply this -  that everybody seems to be married, or close to it. I'll admit that that should not have come as a surprise to me - I'm working with mostly older people who have been established for a while, but it was still a bit of a shock to go from an environment full of horny college kids to an environment where people ask about your kids. Even the intern who is one cubicle over has a wife and two kids (he is a bit older, though). It's a total change in attitude.

The internship is going well on pretty much every front. My manager likes me, my group lead loves me, and I'm getting a lot of good work done. My lead wonders how I get so much done, but I've gone from juggling a lot of classes in hard majors, having leadership positions in two clubs and being fairly active in two more, and trying to have a social life - to focusing on one or two things at a time and having my social life pretty much handed to me (the other interns are much better at planning stuff to do than I am, and my housemate has connections). Also, I don't have the experience to know how to responsibly procrastinate (yet) and I like what I'm doing much better than the stuff I'm doing at school. So yes, I do good work and I'm enjoying myself immensely. I'm definitely having a good experience

I'm still working mostly with cranes, hoists, and manipulators, and all of those can be more intricate than you'd think, especially if the operator can't be in the room with them. Some of the cranes in black cells, where no one will be allowed after the plant starts up because of intense radiation, have some pretty cool configurations that involve cameras and lasers. When I've visited the site, I've seen that there are two colors of cranes. The yellow cranes are permanent, and the blue ones come out after construction is done. There are a lot more permanent cranes in the buildings than temporary ones. 

Outside of work, I've been pretty active. My housemate is training for a triathlon, so I've been tagging along when she goes to the gym. I'm still biking a lot, more out of convenience than for exercise. I've gone out hiking a few times. Some hikes have been spectacular, some have just been so-so, but it's fun getting out with friends. I've also gone to a few more Tri-Cities Dust Devil baseball games, but they've lost every game I've been at, so I might stop going.

I've gained a guard dog. My housemate has two small poodles, and I've won the loyalty of one, D.O.G. (emphasis on the "O"), by virtue of my generosity with belly rubs and treats. He's quite the funny puppy.  

I missed 4th of July at home. In Washington, I saw some fireworks, and had some awesome ribs and a pint ..... of blueberries (still not quite drinking age). I miss the pageantry, and the awesome fireworks from back home, but nothing can quite compare to those on the coast.

TLDR: I'm doing fine, people like me, I like people, 4th of July at home is better.

Have a great week!