Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire

Sorry for the long wait since the last post, guys – it’s been rough. But before I get into that long story, I’d say a re-evaluation of this semester’s Mechatronics courses is an order:

• MECHENG 211, aka Thermofluids: well dayumm, the third years weren’t kidding when they said it was the hardest course in second year. The content is alright but the assessments have been a killer.
• MECHENG 222, Dynamiks: shout-out to the infamous Hazim Namik, who made our weekly graded quizzes into something fun: the Clan Wars. We get to split ourselves into clans of about thirty people and duke it out to see which clan can get the highest total score at the end of the semester.
• MECHENG 270, aka Software: not too bad for a C++ course with real harsh reviews. The assignments so far have been pretty cool but can’t really say that for the test…
• ENGGEN 204, aka Communication: if you hate English, have mediocre English skills or just plain suck at the language, prepare to get brain-raped by a bullshit technical report assignment (ft. stupid ‘Engineering report’ formatting) and weekly writing exercises that don’t make any goddamn sense.

  

And for those who want an evaluation of ENGSCI 311 (MM3) that badly, it’s not too much change from ENGSCI 211 in terms of the first half of the semester. Second half’s a whole different story, though. Now, story time.

First reason for the delay:

Week 5 was Hell Week for Mechatronics. We all got rekt by the stack of assessments clustered in that one week: 222 Test on Tuesday, 211 Test on Wednesday, 270 T

est on Friday and 204 Technical Report also due on Friday. Personally, I’d describe that experience like drowning; most of us were still alive and breathing after our first test but our morale sank lower with every test. The results showed in our class averages: 75% for the 222 Test, 64% for the 211 Test, and 55% for the 270 Test.

What followed were three things: a messed up week for Civil, a chill week for us, and two weeks of ‘mid-semester break’.

Second reason for the delay:

The first week back after ‘mid-semester break’ was Hell Week 2.0 for Mechatronics students doing the Warman Competition and was even worse for those of us taking 311.

• Monday: MECHENG 270 Assignment 2 due
• Tuesday: MECHENG 222 Project A due
• Wednesday: ENGSCI 311 Assignment 2 due
• Thursday: Local Finals for Warman Competition

It all seemed manageable the week before the break, but none of us thought that the 270 Assignment would take as long as it did. In the end, sacrifices had to be made.

Three members of our four-man Warman team – including me – had the 311 Assignment to grind through, an assignment which we only managed to finish an hour or so before it was due. Seeing as it was practically impossible to finish our Warman robot in less than 13 hours with two sick teammates and no laser cutters, 3D printers or toolkits, we had to give up on a project that we had high hopes for at the start of the year.

Our team wasn’t the only one on the crash-and-burn list, though; the day before the Local Finals for Warman, the toxic af guy that was the technician for the laser cutting labs banned everyone from using the laser cutters for pretty much no reason. Yeah nah, not too many people like him now…

Anyway, I know this was a real long post compared to the last few but I hope you enjoyed it. More coming in mid-October.

Busby out.