HELLO again my fellow procrastinators, dog enthusiasts and the “generally confused with what to do with their lives” people. My third blog will be a summary of how I spent my holidays (tl;dr: see title of blog) and some helpful resources that will hopefully help you become *slightly* less confused with what to do with your life (or maybe even more confused 
).
Firstly, holidays started “late” for the mech students compared to everyone else because we had our MECHENG 242 exam on the second to last day of the exam period. While everyone was enjoying their early start to freedom, we were busy cramming content, regretting not studying throughout the year and getting stuck on practice question after practice queSTION after pRaCtIsE qUeStIoN. As soon as we walked out of our final exam, our final grades for MECHENG 201 were released, which made some of us even more salty….
Most of my first week of holidays included stressfully waiting for final course marks to be released and then being disappointed and watching my GPA drop. 🙁 Hopefully next semester will be better – fingers crossed! Also, did you know you can request your exam scripts to see which parts of the exam you completely bombed or the parts you nailed?
Check out the link for requesting exam scripts here:
http://bit.ly/request_exam_script_uoa
However the best part of my first week of holidays was volunteering for Enginuity Day at the University. This event is organised by the Women in Engineering Network (WEN) and gives high school girls the opportunity to see what engineering is like through awesome workshop activities held around uni. Helping out at Enginuity Day and taking around a group of eager potential future engineers was super rewarding and fun, even though I had to get to uni at 7:30am. I would definitely recommend volunteering and attending the events WEN put on during the year, if you would like to be more involved around uni or make new friends.
Check out WEN here: http://bit.ly/Women_In_Engineering_UoA
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In the second week of my holidays, I had my engineering workshop (ENGGEN 299), which is a compulsory component of the Engineering degree. My workshops were held at AUT (for some reason in the basement of the Law building) for four consecutive days. We learnt how to weld and how to use different machines such as a lathe, a milling machine and a drill press. My least favourite activity was having to file pieces of metal for at least 2 hours and probably inhaling a whole bunch of metal. 
My favourite activity was using the lathe and milling machine to create a beautifully symmetrical plumb bob and spirit level. Welding was also fun and exciting!
Check out more info on ENGGEN 299 here: http://bit.ly/ENGGEN299
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Finally, I spent my last week of the inter-semester holidays doing loads of research (and stressing out) about internships for undergraduate mechatronics engineers. Practical work is a compulsory part of the Engineering degree and students are required to complete 800 hours as well as write a formal report detailing their work experience. I dedicated a few days to creating a LinkedIn profile and revamping my CV, as well as writing cover letters for my applications. A tip from me when looking for internships is to get started early and make sure you know when the opening and closing dates are for applications. Also the uni has a super useful portal called MyCDES which helps students find out about career events, employers and workshops.
Check out more info on http://bit.ly/Practical_Work_UoA and http://bit.ly/MyCDES_UoA
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If you got to the end of this blog, well done and thank you for reading so far! Stay tuned for my next blog which should be up around the end of August, if I’m feeling inspired. In the meantime, go check out my earlier blogs where I introduce myself and get attacked by Canvas and Piazza notifications.
~V