Amongst all of my whining about school there is some good news: I have secured myself a summer internship! Yay!!

One of the nice things about living in Portland is that there are actually quite a few tech companies in the area. So last February when we had a technical career fair at school, there was a pretty reasonable showing. I showed up with a few resumes and my winning smile.

A few weeks later, a company which apparently knows how to spot a fantastic employee, gave me a call and we set up an appointment for me to come in to chat. My interview was on a Monday. Wednesday I had an official offer, it became official on Friday. I was surprised they moved so quick, as it’s a pretty large company. Technically I still have a background check to get through, but I don’t foresee that being a problem.

My bank account is getting scarier and scarier these days, so I’m obviously pretty happy to make some money. This summer internship will provide about 2/3’s of my financing for my senior (SENIOR!!!) year. I will say that their offer was higher than I expected (but lower than I asked for ). I’ll do OK as far as interns go.

On top of the money, it’ll be great to get some engineering experience. I have a vague idea of what I’ll be doing, but it’s pretty vague. I do know that I’ll be given a project at the start of the term which will be my main focus for the duration of my internship. That’s pretty nice, often times interns are brought in as cheap labor to assist in existing project and may or may not end up getting lost along the way as the deadline of a project takes precedence over an intern’s personal experience. Having a stand-alone project is definitely more interesting, more exciting, and should provide some nice resume dressing.

Another nice thing about this particular internship is that I get to experience a company that I may not have considered for a full time position when I graduate. Not that I have any problems with the actual company, but they are a fairly large corporation. I need to find a place that will allow me to move my career forward without much consideration to how long I’ve been employed there, and I feel like it would be more difficult to stand out (and therefore get promoted quicker) in a large company. I’ve heard good thing about these guys from other people who’ve worked there before and, as you’re about to see, they’ve so far shown that they know how to take care of their employees.

On top of the pretty damn good salary (for an intern), I will be getting full health benefits. I had heard of this beforehand, but it’s still pretty sweet. My old employer back in TX didn’t provide shit for interns. But there’s more than just health benefits.

The lady from Human Resources blew me away when she explained to me that interns earn a little over 3 hours of vacation for every two-week period. Yes. Vacation. Summer interns get motherfucking vacation. As an intern I will earn paid time off, aka: vacation!

Good pay, good opportunity, health benefits and vacation. Can’t get any better, right? Wrong!

As we wrapped up the conversation I had one last question for HR. “What’s the dress code,” I asked, “is it business? Business casual?”

That’s when she said it, “[our company] doesn’t have a dress code. You can where jeans and a t-shirt if you want as long as the t-shirt doesn’t have anything offensive on it.”

“…doesn’t have a dress code.”

“…doesn’t…” “…dress code.”

I’m not sure if she actually sang that part or if it just sounded that way to my ears but they won some big points with me. I always say that the biggest benefit of an internship is that, if things go well, you’ll have a job offer before you even graduate and that’s huge. Who knows, maybe by the end of this summer I’ll not only have a job offer, but maybe I’ll find that working for a large corporation isn’t terrible.

Oh, and did I mention the vacation time?

The term is more than half done already and I haven’t shared how I’ve been spending my time. So, as always, my schedule:

Spring 2012

It’s been a weird term. Not overly aggressive in terms of workload, but insanely uninteresting and completely lacking of joy. Though admittedly it’s hard to say for sure if that’s a function of my classes or a function of my personal increasing distaste for the “learning experience” we call college.

Often times when I tell people how many classes I’m taking during a particular term, they reply with some comment about my workload being pretty high. I’ve always just shrugged and explained that “that’s just the way it is” for engineering students.

“Four classes a term is the norm,” I’d say.

The ECE (electrical and computer engineering) department provides a set of proposed class schedules for each term of all four years of undergrad. Affectionately referred to as the “blue sheets” (as they’re printed on blue paper) they allow you, the student, to get through your undergraduate program in four years by blindly following a blue sheet of your choice (there are 6 different blue sheets, each with a different focus within the electrical engineering spectrum).

It is those very blue sheets which dictate that students take four classes each term. Those very blue sheets which have me explaining to my non-engineering friends that 17-19 hours a term is just how we roll. We’re engineering students, this is how we do it.

Or so I thought.

The Winter term of Junior year is claimed to be the toughest term in all of undergrad. Several of my senior-level friends warned me about it. Apparently the engineering advisors were warning students as well. At least two of my friends went to see an advisor before the term and both of them were warned to not take four classes. Both of them were advised to take no more than 3 classes since the classes were extra heavy and there would be two engineering labs this term. Both of them were advised to deviate from the school-provided blue sheets which clearly map out how to graduate in four years.

“Well how does that work?” you might be asking. How does one take fewer classes in a term and still graduate in four years? Well, according to one advisor, an EE undergrad degree should “really be considered a 5 year degree” (paraphrased). So it was that, in my small and informal survey of students, I could not find a single classmate which was taking four classes and two labs this past term.

Other than me of course.

This brings me to the complaint I had begun making last post. This past term I was putting in more (class) hours than anyone else I know of, and I simply couldn’t do it. There was simply not enough time in the week to get everything done.

This why I feel like my GPA was taken from me. Though I was doing more than even the advisors were suggesting, I wasn’t just pulling it out of my ass. I was following the blue sheet. I was following the path set forth by PSU in order to graduate in four years. This isn’t my plan, this is theirs.

So I think it’s utter horse shit to hear that students are being told an electrical engineering degree should be considered a five year degree. If PSU can’t get students from start to finish in four years then they shouldn’t advertise that they can. Some of us aren’t trust-fund babies, or come from families that can support us room & board for as long as it takes. For some of us, the difference between four years and five years is the difference between degree and no degree.

Of the many things I’ve learned about college since become a student the one lesson that gets repeated almost every term is that schools have no accountability. From shitty teachers who keep teaching, to raising my tuition 9% while handing out scholarships to footballs players to play on a terrible team, to telling you a degree is doable in 4 years and then changing their story in your third year. There’s no fucking accountability.

For those of you who’ve never gone to college, let share with you the two main lessons you learn from being a student. Lesson 1: you should become a teacher. Lesson 2: if you’re not a teacher, you should be a very angry taxpayer.

Piss & vinegar aside, I should take a breath and make one thing pretty clear. Most of the professors I’ve had (especially in the EE department) have been good-to-excellent. I don’t want it to sound like they’re all shit, because they’re not. However as of this moment, I feel like that has more to do with happenstance than design.

As of this moment I do not feel like PSU, as an institution, is on my side.

The Winter 2012 term is officially complete, and let me say that I got my ass kicked. This was not a good term. Not a good term at all.

While grades for this term are still a good week away, I can say with a pretty high level of certainty that I will not be happy when I see mine. In the final weeks of the term, if you would’ve asked me I would have told you that I really didn’t care. I was too tired to care. I just wanted the term over.

I’ve mentioned before that the challenge of an engineering degree isn’t in the difficulty of the classes, but in the quantity of work to be done in a given period of time. I had become accustomed to the 60-70 hour weeks over the last few terms. However this term took it to a whole new level. This term was unlike any before it.

For the bulk of the term I was putting in 90+ hours a week. I remember looking back on last term with my 60 hours weeks and laughing to myself that I had complained about it. Suddenly spending 60-70 hours on school seemed like a vacation. Yet amazingly enough, as the term’s end approached my courses demanded even more of me.

Though I had absolutely no free time final projects & papers, combined with homework and exams, had me trying to scrape a few extra hours into my days. Having a paper due the next day, on Wednesday of week 10 (the final week of classes) I stayed up until 3 in the morning writing. With my alarm going off at 7 a.m. I had 4 hours of sleep to keep me through the day. After class, and lunch, I headed down to the lab to meet my partner. Our final project report was due the following day and, though our circuits were designed and working according to spec., we had a lo-o-ong way to go on our report. So we sat there writing, calculating, verifying. Taking screen shots of simulations and plotting data into graphs. 10 pm came and we weren’t close. Midnight had us closer, but not close enough. By 3 a.m. I was feeling my second wind.

By 3:10 a.m. my second wind was gone.

Four hours later the sun rose over Portland. Though we were awake, we did not witness the day’s beginning, as the lab has no windows. By that point I was complete with my half and working on merging my partner’s material into the final report. I was, to say the least, exhausted. Finishing mattered more than finishing well.

Around 9:30 my partner and I stumbled our way to the engineering office to drop off our final report. Four hours of sleep over a 72 hour period is more than my old ass can handle. I went home and crashed. When I awoke later that evening I opened our report and read my half. It was terrible. So many things were left out. I closed the file and went back to bed. I still had an exam that was due on Saturday (it was now Friday evening) that I had not begun, and the following week would be finals week and I was sorely behind in of my classes.

Though most of the term meant 90-100 hour workweeks, I can’t even begin to guess how many hours I spent during the final two weeks, though I can say with certainty it was greater than 100 hours. But in the end, it wasn’t enough.

All of my classes suffered this term. This term simply pushed me further than I could go. My grades won’t reflect my understanding. My grades won’t reflect my interest, my attentiveness, nor my drive. This term my grades will reflect the severe beating I received.

As the term drew to a close, I cared less and less about my grades. I just wanted to call it done. However, after a few days of relaxing and recharging I’m starting to find the energy to care again. I’m annoyed. I’ve put in a fair amount of work to get a reasonable GPA and that’s been shit on.

If I lost my GPA due a difficult class then I’d accept it. However I feel like my GPA was taken from me by a schedule that is completely unreasonable. Which happens to be a perfect segway to my next post, which should be just around the corner.

Slight warning: this post is about a sexual dream I had (though there won’t be anything overly explicit). Why exactly am I about to share this dream? Read on and you’ll find out.

I literally just woke up. I decided I had to share this while I still remembered it.

There’s this woman, and we’re being all flirty with each other. She’s wearing a dress and black stockings. Next thing I know she sits down and spreads her legs for me. She’s not wearing panties. I’m about to go down on her but there’s a small hang up.

In my dream I can’t remember how to find the amplitude of her kitty. Do I just take the magnitude coefficient and call it the amplitude? Or is the vag. the real portion of the complex number that is her privates. In which case I need to take the the square root of the sum of the squares of the real and imaginary portions (i.e.: the Pythagorean theorem) of her lady parts. She’s right there. She’s waiting. I’m freaking out because I can’t remember which of her parts I’m supposed to use for the imaginary!

For those unawares, these are considerations that may arise when dealing with various wave equations that may or may not have complex numbers.

Yes, my “sexual dream” turned into an engineering problem. Worse yet, an engineering problem that I couldn’t solve. I think it’s safe to say that, at this point, school has saturated literally every aspect of my life. Even as I type this I’m reminding myself that, it doing go, I’m going to be arriving at the lab that much later and I absolutely must bang out my lab report (and pre-lab for tomorrow’s lab) as fast as I can so I can get back to preparing for this week’s emag. exam.

And for those wondering if I ever got the girl… no I woke up trying frantically to figure out the solution.

I hate everything.

OK, no I don’t. But still…