First Week

This first week is always so crazy, but I love it. All these new people to meet, new things to learn...new notebooks! There's few things more exciting than a brand-spanking-new notebook. All those blank pages.

I've decided that I pretty much love my classes.
Thermal Design has an awesome professor with an absolutely unreal memory (he knows like half the class although he's only ever seen them at info sessions or heard about them in department news and stuff...he remembered me from an open house I attended 3 years ago!)
CAD/CAM is kind of boring, but only because I've used the program we are using already, so until we get to something other than the basics of using it, there's not much for me to learn. I like CAD programs, though, because you get to create actual Things in 3D and you can look at them and everything. Think that thing Tony Stark from Ironman has in his garage, except without the holograms (although I'm fairly sure every mechanical engineer wants one of those with the holograms).
Stats is a class that people hate when they need to take it, but since I know why I want to take it, and I am rather pleased with it so far. We'll see how the workload and stuff goes. We have homework already, but since it's a 3hr class once a week, that's not too surprising.
Manufacturing seems much more interesting to me than materials class was. I have it for the second time in about 2 hours, we'll see how it is when it's not just an introduction.
IPRO. You'll hear a lot about IPRO's because they are fairly central to "the IIT experience." For those who haven't heard of them, IPRO stands for Inter-Professional Project, and it's a real-world project (often requested and/or sponsored by a company or a professor, sometimes by a student), that students of different majors get together to work on. My current IPRO is one on refuelable electric cars. My professor thinks we will change the world and take pictures with President Obama. And, really, if we get it to work, we could! The basic idea is using a different kind of battery that uses up its electrolyte as it runs. It's not rechargeable, but it is refuelable with more electrolyte! And this electrolyte is safe; at the very least much safer than the gasoline we use now. Overall, if this strategy works, it is possible to end dependence on foreign oil, save the environment...the whole shebang. And that is why our project can change the world. I'm super-excited.

SWE (Society of Women Engineers) is doing some great things, too. Some of our events are less attended than last year, but we have more of them. An event every day this week; it's pretty hard on the exec board, but we're pulling through. And last night's event turned into sitting around the table talking about internship and IIT experiences. I feel like that is the sort of thing our organization needs more of; sitting around a table and sharing what it's like to be a woman in steel-toed boots.

Anyway, first week is pretty hectic, but not too bad, all in all. And now I go to copy over my manufacturing notes before class.