Even though I still have one midterm left, I am halfway
through the term, temporally speaking.
As always, my predictions regarding how my classes would go haven’t been
entirely accurate. Embedded Systems,
while still my favorite class, is getting surprisingly tough, and my
programming class seems to be getting easier every week, which in all honesty
is making me kind of nervous. I’ll know
a lot more after the midterm on Monday, but I think overall how that class
works is: if you survive the labs, you’ll do fine in lecture.
Then there’s microelectronics. Simply put, its difficult, uninteresting, and
largely irrelevant to my interests. The
midterm was last Tuesday, and while things could have gone much worse, it
wasn’t exactly a walk in the park either.
But at least I have realistic expectations this time about the kind of
grade I am likely to get, having had this professor last term as well. I think the bullshit B I got in calculus last
term is still weighing on me, because this is really the first time I have
taken a class and genuinely thought that I would be happy simply passing it. Of course, in my case, passing means B or better, so what I'm really saying is: if I
get a B, I’ll be very happy and I will probably never think about this class
again.
Speaking of never thinking about something ever again, I had
an interview with Intel last week that was remarkably terrible. See, the way engineering interviews generally
work (so I’m told) is they start off asking easy questions and then increase in
difficulty until you can’t answer them.
Then they know where your education stands and how much of an investment
they will need to make in you before you can actually perform helpful work. So you can imagine how awesome it must have
been to not be able to answer even the first few questions that were
asked. And then continue on for 45
minutes basically responding with, “I don’t know” or “I’ve never done that” to
every question. Now, I’m not going to go
on and on about how horrible it was and how it was the worst interview of my
life, but seriously, it was horrible and it was the worst interview of my life.
Rolling a critical failure on my first big interview put me
into a real funk for a while, but after a little time and perspective, I do
feel better. It was purely a software engineering position, and that’s just not
my specialty. I wasn’t qualified and
it’s not right for me to beat myself up about that. It did, however, force me to put some real
work into my internship search, reworking my resume, and getting organized for
the next interview. By the time I did
all of that stuff, someone else from Intel had contacted me for a position I
think I am considerably more qualified for.
That interview is on Monday, so hopefully I will have some good news to
share soon.
And speaking of good news: the ECE department has officially
recommended me for admission to their graduate program. This is exciting news,
considering the departmental application is considerably more difficult than
the general college application (Do you live here? Will you pay us? Yes? Well, that pretty much wraps
up the interview portion of the application. I’m proud to say you have been
admitted!) So I am very happy to have
one less thing up in the air. Happy
enough, in fact, that I almost forgot about the midterm I have in about 48
hours, which I really should get back to studying for. But I just had to post something: Looking
back, being admitted to my graduate program is something I want to
remember.
