After a nice break from the previous year’s grind, it was time to get back to learning.
I was indeed excited – I had already completed one year of my degree and made it through! I was on my way to reaching my goal. Since the second semester of the year before, I knew I wanted to do electrical engineering.
When I tell people that, their usual response is “Why?”. For some reason, electrical engineering is not a common choice of specialisation at the moment. Not sure why, there is certainly a demand for electrical engineers, and it’s a very useful degree to have! (Think of when your power cuts out at home).
Anyway, my goal is to get renewable energy into third world countries. It’s a bit different, but after having a daughter at a young age, I have come to appreciate the challenges that other mums and dads must face with much fewer resources than me. If my daughter is cold, I can turn on the heater. If she is hungry, I can cook some food and feed her. If she is thirsty, I give her some water. These simple tasks are not so simple for those less fortunate.
I could have done mechanical engineering too, but I’m not good at mechanics, so the choice was easy! Electrical engineering will provide me with knowledge and people I need to get energy to these people in desperate need. Babies are dying in hospital from hypothermia, children are sick from drinking unclean water, families are starving. While not all of these problems can be fixed with energy, many can. I want to do my bit to reduce the suffering and pain of those in third world countries.
Getting to the first few weeks of my new specialisation:
Honestly, the first few weeks were pretty good. The workload wasn’t as heavy as I expected (not that I’m complaining!). I was up to date with the content and doing reasonably well in assignments and tests. Electeng 202 was my favourite course, as it covers circuit theory which I enjoyed learning about during the previous year. Electeng 210 was harder, but still fairly straight forward. We were learning about diodes which I enjoyed.
Mathematical Modelling 2 was the heaviest course to begin with. It is fast paced and requires a lot of work all semester round. You could attend all the lectures but still not know what is going on at all- until you took some time out to go through the content yourself. That’s for me at least, maths isn’t my strongest subject so it could well have been different for other people!
The most difficult subject for me was Compsys 201. During the first week or two, you are just revising all of last years content about combinational logic. You will think the course is super easy! But don’t be fooled, it gets harder. I find it difficult to follow all the lectures. Much of the content is conceptual, if you lose focus for one minute, you will likely miss something important and be lost for the rest of the lecture.
My degree is hard work, but that’s any engineering degree, don’t worry what anyone says about electrical engineering, think about what your goals are and do what you need to achieve them!
Until next time,
– Chantelle xx