Half Empty or Half Full?
Can you believe half half the semester has already gone by? I sure do. So far this semester I’ve stayed till 12am in a lab, fluffed my interview and currently typing this up at uni. Yes. During the mid sem break. The jump in commitment expected from students has massively jumped, and you wouldn’t survive without the correct mindset. Theres a massive discrepancy in discrepancy regarding the difficulties in each course we take this sem, so I’ll be having a mid game interview, and breaking down each course so far.
ENGGEN 204
I will be forever grateful for this course existing. We’re taught how to work collaboratively, and the workload is very manageable. Of course, your experience within this course will heavily depend on your group members, but as long as you’re all on the same page, this course will be your biggest joy this entire sem.
ELECTENG 204
If you thought you knew everything about circuits than you’d be disproven in this course. Turns out electricity actually took time to travel. Who would have known! Eventually we move on to electromagnets; which is faintly reminiscent of the stuff we were tuaght in high school, but of course with more depth, and less idealisations. (No, these perpetual machines do not actually work)
ELECTENG 292
As the sister course to ELECTENG 291 I expected another uphill grind, but so far its been surprisingly manageable. Once again we come back to the scheme of looking at the same circuit, but from different angles. If you don’t understand what I’m exactly talking about yet, you’ll realize (if you do choose electrical) that looking at things with respect to time, prevents us from seeing a lot of things. The labs are less stressful compared to 209, and we truly get to see how things, despite not ideal, remain true to the theory.
ELECTENG 209
As per usual I left the best for last. This course is infamous for its difficulty and it sure delivers. I found myself frequently staying in the labs well past my bedtime, and losing out to the code I’ve written; as I debug it for the 100th time. I believe the difficult lies in the depth and breadth of this course, whilst mixed in with the practical aspect. Its almost as if before we were living in a germless vacuum, and now we’re thrown into the real world, where decisions aren’t all made for us anymore. Circuits will not work for seemingly no reason, your code will throw you the most wacky errors, and things will not work the first time.
LOCK IN!
I’d argue this semester is harder than sem 1 purely due to 209. 292 builds off of 291 rather than teaching something completely new, and 204 just intuitively makes a lot of sense. Purely content wise this semester is much more interesting than sem 1. In sem 1 we have build a solid base of knowledge for us to expand upon in sem 2, and now is where we get into the details, which normally is where value lies.