Failing the First Midterm in Engineering

Hey everyone, my name is Ash and I'm an undergraduate Mechanical Engineer in my junior year (which I believe is the hardest year). I recently just started blogging because I want to learn to organize my thoughts to express them intelligently, either on paper or face to face conversations. Now that I have introduced myself, let’s get started on this blog! Today I wanted to bring up the topic of the "First Midterm Exam" that you take every semester...

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Starting Graduate School, but what courses to take?!

As some of you know I recently got accepted into the Masters of Engineering program (electrical engineering). I decided to pursue a Masters of Engineering over the Masters of Applied Science degree because I no longer have any interest in doing research and continuing my studies in nanotechnology. I have decided I want to pursue a career in working with power companies. Right now I have been researching about what courses I want to take that would...

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Dealing With Rejection… During an Interview

Looking for a co-op or internship is a lot like dating. You dress up, you meet new people in your field, and you try to convince them to pick you by highlighting the qualities that they are looking for. Sometimes things don’t work out. And whether it’s after the first meeting or the last round before making it official, getting rejected from a job opportunity you really wanted hurts. Here’s my horror story: When I entered college I was an industrial...

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Make Something

Engineering has some long, strange paths with high rewards. I started out tearing apart broken electronics while I was in middle school, and in my freshmen year of high school I wanted to become an electronics engineer. My high school offered classes in QBASIC, and I actually found that to be more entertaining than attempting to reconstruct Frankenstereo. I moved on to Visual Basic and HTML/JavaScript thinking WIndows software and webpages would...

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Graduate School

How important is graduate school for engineers? I know in most cases engineers should be able to find a job with an undergraduate degree because of the amount of knowledge we acquire in school and how practical our degree is. Typically in our undergrad we take much more courses than other faculties in the span of four to five years. Many people choose to go work and start their career rather than go back to school for another two to five years. I...

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Engineering Methods in Life

Design, build, fix, as engineers this is what we spend the majority of our time doing. We enjoy problems, we enjoy solving problems, contemplating issues and devising eloquent solutions for them. I am sure that if more political types were engineers the nations of the world would run much smoother. There are a lot of situations in life where engineering best practices and methodologies can be easily applied and the results positive; however, there are those times when these applications produce somewhat undesirable, if not comical results. To...

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The Social Stigmas of Engineering

With every conversation with whoever it may be, every conversation tends to stray towards education: what, where and why you are studying what you are studying. I'm not sure about you engineering students out there, but I sometimes double take whenever someone asks me what I'm studying in school. Now, I'm not the type of person to actually care about what other people think of me (u mirin brah?) but we all have to accept the fact that there...

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Prerequisites

Any engineer or future engineering student has encountered what "Prerequisite's" are. It is the long list of classes that any engineering student must accomplish to receive a Bachelors in Engineering. Yes, the list seems very intimidating at first, and in all honestly, the path is not easy. However they are important. Very important. If you fail you'll have to go back and retake the course or if you do poorly it may effect your marks in future. This list of classes determines your fate as an engineer. Each class must be passed with a C...

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