Another big relief

Arguably, I was a great deal happier upon the discovery of my summer term grades, however I had a very similar feeling today when I finally obtained admission into the classes I have to take this fall.   So this is what my final schedule looks like… 

The green classes are at PSU, the purple one is at PCC.  Registration for the PSU classes was entirely straightforward: I only needed those two, they each were only offered once, and they didn't conflict with each other.  Score.

However, these classes didn't play very well with PCC's math department.  You're looking at the only possible outcome that could have possibly worked.  Sure, there were other Math 252 classes-- there were 9 of them-- but all except that one either conflicted with the PSU classes, or were ridiculously far away.  Out of curiosity, I mapped out how long it would take to get to the "Rock Creek Campus", wherever that is.  Oh, about two hours.  Each way.  Sorry but that ain't happening.   To complicate matters further, the one viable math class was, of course, full.  So after pleading with the professor, she finally let me in with only a couple days to spare.  Had this not happened, I would have had to take another math class at PSU. Therefore, I would have had to buy a 3-term math text for one class, pay about 3 times more for the credits, and likely get a worse education.   So I'm glad things worked out the way they did.

With that all said and done, I am pretty excited about these classes.  Taking ECE 221, (Analog) Circuit Analysis, will be very nice, as I feel like a lot of the digital circuitry classes I have taken so far reference concepts from it and assume you have already taken it.  I wasn't able to take it first because Calculus is required.  I'm guessing that it won't be overly difficult, and I should get to dust off my toolkit and build lots of cool stuff, too.

ECE 371 is all about Microprocessors.  Honestly, I don't really know what I am getting into with that class, but it's taught by the guy who wrote the book on microprocessors (No, really... he did) so I have a feeling I will be learning a lot.  I am guessing difficult but interesting.  Probably more programming assignments than hands-on circuit building here.

Math 252 is Math 252.  Calculus II.  Don't really know what to expect, but so far my pure math classes haven't been too hard.  Hopefully not too much busywork from this course.

A nice little milestone: this term I will take my first upper-division ECE class!  I will be taking a lot of those over the next couple terms, then next summer I do an internship (Google, are you reading this?), then a year from now, I am beginning the Masters program. Time really flies when you're in engineering school!

The other great thing about next term: I have Friday off! How cool is that?  I am sure that I will need to use the entire day to study, though...