Freedom!... for a few months

Final exams for winter semester have come and gone, and I'm happy and proud to say that I survived first year engineering. Phew. I'm not gonna lie - the last semester was the hardest one I've ever had. With up to 10 hours of labs a week - which is practically a part-time job - I felt like I barely had time to absorb anything. My MO was to get shit done, which was easier once I found some people to work with... which leads to my next point, which is that the importance of teamwork in engineering coursework cannot be overly emphasized. A word of advice for anyone reading this going into engineering: find reliable people that you can compare/share homework with. If you're not confident that what you're handing in is already correct, by the time you get it back and find out it's wrong, you don't have time to relearn it.
Another word of advice: locate and use all possible resources. By this I mean solution manuals, teachers' solution manuals, a cramster account, former students' homework and assignments, etc. Trust me - when you know you have something reliable to double check your work with, life is much less stressful.
A run-down of my courses:

• Math 101 (Calc 2) - The lectures were terrible and I gave up on them after the first 2 weeks. I basically taught myself out of the textbook. But that was actually not too painful except for the last few sections on expressing functions as power series and the Taylor series. Like most math courses, if you do enough practice problems, you're good. 
• Physics 101 - This course covered a ton of material and it was pretty tough, by my standards, anyway. We covered gravitation, pressure, fluids (Bernoulli, buoyancy, etc.), thermodynamics, heat engines, wave functions, standing waves, doppler effect, beats, electric fields, gauss' law, point charges, dipoles... the list goes on. I'm sure half of it has already fallen out of my brain. The labs were totally unrelated to the lecture material - mostly about electricity - and were actually easier than the labs in Physics 100. Or maybe I just managed to follow their marking system. Sometimes, things are marked in a dumb way, but as long as it's consistent, you can give them what they want. That's all I will say about that. Also, they have this 24-hour due date policy with physics labs. It made a lot of people unhappy, but it didn't bother me that much. I wanted to get it off my plate as quickly as possible anyway, so I always just handed it in the same day.
• Chem 101 - Pretty much followed the same format and style as Chem 100. Same professor (Dr. Whitcombe). We did a lot of acid/base/solubility ICE tables. He makes it pretty straightforward.
• Chem 121 - This 1-credit lab course was the bane of my existence. The marking scheme was punitive and I found it discouraging, much like last semester. 
• Ensc 150 (Environmental Engineering) - By far the most interesting course of the whole year. Dr. Helle is a great instructor - good lecturer, approachable, and helpful. We covered interesting topics like how everything is toxic, figuring out how much chemical is in or moving through soils/air/water, risk levels, mass balances, etc. I found this course challenging, but some of the 2nd years in the class said it was easy. Maybe some of the courses they had already taken gave them a big advantage.
• Ensc 151 (Engineering tools) - Another 1-credit lab course. This one was not bad though since we learned how to use some presumably useful and important software: Excel, Visio, ArcMaps, and AutoCAD. I thought this class was interesting.

On a whiny note, I don't like that lab courses are only worth 1 credit when they are 3 hours a week just like lectures, and we end up spending the same amount or more time on them (particularly for chemistry). 

And now, back to my summer...

Degree 1/9th complete

I don't know whether to be inspired or depressed by that. The journey has begun, and it's good to be, well, not at the very beginning anymore, but it seems like a very long way to go.
Notes from last semester:

• Math 100 turned out to be not so bad. The prof never actually asked us to regurgitate math definitions and theorems, only apply them. All that agony for nothing.
• Chem 120 (lab) was a pretty bad experience. More on that in a later post.
• I studied for the physics final like I've never studied for anything. And it turned out okay. Not amazing, but all right. Now that we're onto waves and pressure and other stuff, I can push all that kinematics to the remote regions of my brain.

Starting again this semester was difficult, for a number of reasons. For one, the break didn't feel long enough and I wasn't ready to start again. However, here I am, into week 2, and it's not so bad after all. On the schedule this semester is the following:

• Math 101 - Calculus 2
• Physics 111 - Waves and Electricity
• Chem 101 - General Chemistry 2
• Chem 120 (Lab)
• Ensc 150 - Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering
• Ensc 151 - Engineering Tools

Ensc 150 is quite interesting and has a lot of practical application, like converting between science-y and industry units for concentrations, and figuring out things like how much of a toxic spill will evaporate and how fast, etc, etc. It's meant to be a first year course, but there are a lot of second year students in it. It's probably incredibly easy for them, since most of them have already done organic/biochemistry and physical chemistry, material and energy balance and hydrology. (Read: I feel and probably look like an idiot asking questions.) The prof is good, but his notes are sometimes hard to follow because he skips steps. All you teachers out there: please write down everything.

Environmental engineering 1st year fall courses

My 1st year engineering courses at UNBC this semester:

• Introductory Physics I: Mechanics
• General Chemistry 
• General Chemistry Lab (apparently this is a separate course -  it's possible to take Chemistry sans lab)
  
• Calculus
  
• Introduction to Engineering Seminar
• Geomorphology

I'm amazed at the resources available to students to help us be successful here. For example, you can get free tutoring at the Teaching and Learning Centre. They also try to get more senior students to sit in on first year math and science classes so they can set up separate help sessions later. Wow. Having not done math and science since, oh, high school, this makes me feel a lot better about things.
The one class I feel anxious about now is geomorphology. I thought this was going to be my fun, easy, non-number-crunching class. As it turns out, there are 9 labs, all of which must be handed in twice: once for a quality/completion check, and the second time after they post the answers and you mark up your own lab yourself. I see this is a good idea because I almost never look at assignments once I get them back, so I don't learn from my mistakes... but... I have 5 other classes to do here! Geez! I thought this one would require the least amount of work.
Sometimes, when a wave of cynicsm comes over me, I think they do this on purpose because a class about geology/geography would be just too enjoyable (and maybe easy) otherwise.
But anyways. Now that a wave of optimism has hit, I've decided to embrace this class and do my best to get the most out of it. Right? Right.