The Academic Life

I've heard that some of y'all are concerned that I'm not actually in college here in Dublin, but I promise you, I am.

I'm a little over half way through the semester here at DIT. The work load has been pretty light so far, a few things due each week. Mostly lab reports. For my Irish Culture class, I have an "information packet" due next Friday. It's sort of like a lot of small reports in one, I guess. It's a lot about the Irish language. Did you know Ireland had it's own language? I didn't until I came to Dublin last year. Part of the report was to speak with someone born/raised in Ireland about their opinion on the language; my friend Rachel was glad to help. She also gave me some more of the Irish language info I needed. Things like the Irish word for prime minister (Taoiseach). So after about 20 minutes of that, I'm half way done, yay! She's a fluent Irish speaker, and pretty much awesome all-round. Rachel was one of the first people I met in Dublin when I came for a week last year, and gave me my first tour of the city. She's been a great friend while I've been here and got me plugged into the Christian Union at her college, Trinity. While I'm on a tangent might as well keep going, I'll be on a retreat with the Trinity CU this weekend, to Avoca, a lodgeish thing in the Wicklow mountains.

On the engineering side of things... all is going smoothly, 2 pretty straight forward classes, and 2 not so straight forward. I have one class, Instrumentation, which is all lab based learning. I'm in a group with 3 other people and every two weeks or so we start a new project to build some sort of measuring device. It's proved to be challenging. Me and the boys (of course, I'm the only girl in the class) get along ok, but the tasks we're given don't always match the time and hardware we have available. We did fairly well on our first presentation, on a gas flow measuring device, a few weeks ago. This week's project is a formal report, no presentation. We're to build a strain gauge, I'm actually going into finish that up after I post this. I have one class, controls, which has been really math intensive. I've had to brush up on my calculus and do a lot of reading on my own, which is good for me, I think. The other two classes, Digital Communications and Computer Architecture, are more straight forward. I'm learning a new programming language in CA which has been interesting, I'm actually a bigger fan of it, Assembly, than C, which is what I used last year. In DC, I just finished a report on a voice scrambler. It was all simulation, but we'll be using some hardware in that lab soon, I think.

The atmosphere in DIT is more laid back than Purdue. The lectures are more concerned with you learning the concepts than with you doing a bunch of assignments and reports. It's a double edged sword, though, because it makes me a bit complacent. When I get back to the Purdue EET world of weekly lab reports and daily homework, I'll be in for some culture shock.