Life Lately - Memes for the Stressed Design Engineer
I went to Greece last fall semester! It was my first time in Europe, and I couldn’t wait to enjoy the warm weather, climb the limestone cliffs, and try some epic food. I definitely set my expectations too high, though; the vacation couldn’t have been more disappointing. For starters, I spent most of my time losing my way around the streets. Nobody told me everything there is written in math!
I just find it so ironic that I left the country to get away from the Sigma’s and Pi’s and be grounded in the comforting reality of numbers only to be taunted by their alphabet.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike engineering. It’s just hard! I’m not a complacent guy, but when I spend 4 hours on a single problem, I turn into Socrates’ little-known cousin:
Not to mention that sometimes I get distracted and end up leaving too much work for the last minute.
But honestly, can you really blame me when this is what I put up with in my university classes every day??
This semester hasn’t been that bad, though, so I shouldn’t complain too much. On the first day of my product design class, my professor challenged us to develop something revolutionary. I’m proud to announce a line of groundbreaking products.
The only thing I’m not too sure about is my dynamics class. One day, the professor was deriving Newton’s equations of motion, and I found it pretty hard to believe that all of that came because he saw an apple fall. I mean, it’s not like it all just came to him, did it?
But whenever the difficulty of the curriculum gets the better of me, I remember e=mc2, and my morale is restored.
Before you think that nothing is going well for me, not all hope is lost. While I may not know much about dynamics or physics, I am a bit of a scientist myself. And the first step to a scientist’s success is admitting there’s more to discover.
Now it may sound like I’m complaining, but I promise, I really do enjoy what I do. Life lately has been great. In fact, you could even say life’s been pretty fine.
