Reflections on Year 2 and Thoughts on Year 3

It was challenging. The novelty of going to school again had worn off, and it was grinding through. I was going through some personal challenges as well, which made it less enjoyable, but in the end it turned out all right.

I finally had a full engineering (ie. 6 courses) courseload and it was, well, busy, as you would expect. On the bright side, I had no more labs, and I got to write a few papers, which was a nice change indeed.

On a side tangent: no labs is a definite win. Those 1 credit lab courses sometimes take just as much time and resources as 3 credit courses. I find that frustrating. I also find it frustrating that some lab instructors prefer to mark labs based on perfect data. If labs are not a place where you can explore and make mistakes, then I don't know what the point is. As students, we are trained to all but put our self worth in our grades, so if they want perfect data, then students will give them whatever they want.

I guess I've been thinking about that for a long time, considering I had no labs since first year.

However! Onto UBC and year 3. Although sometimes I really wish it were all over already, the change of scenery should be new and exciting! The courses should also be much more interesting. New people, new residence, in Vancouver, one of the nicest cities in the world. It's going to be great.

Year 2 begins!

After dreading the evitability of returning to school and Prince George all summer, here I am.
Surprisingly, after unpacking everything and saying hi to my good ol' roommates (same as last year), I feel fine now. In fact, after the first week of classes, I feel... excited, even!
I get to learn all this cool stuff:

• ENSC 210 Material and Energy Balances. As far as I can tell, this course is stoichiometry on steroids. We've been told by former students that this course is tough, but very important stuff to know in our field, so I'm interested to see what we're going to learn.
• ENSC 451 Groundwater Hydrology. Lots of terminology but rest assured, apparently all our testing will be based on calculations. Is this taught by an engineer? Yes.
• MATH 371 Probability and Statistics for Scientists and Engineers. This course is legendary in how hard it is. Luckily, this semester they've set up Supplemental Instruction (SI), which is basically a separate tutorial led by a peer tutor who has already taken the course and done well.
• ENSC 302 Energy Development. Endless charts and graphs of CO2 emissions, energy consumption, forecasts of global temperatures - per country, per capita, etc. Quite depressing, really - the future looks rather bleak. This course has no pre-requisites, though, so there isn't a lot of math involved, which is a nice change.
• CHEM 201 Organic Chemistry. Brute force memorization. Again, I don't think there is going to be much math involved in this course either, but I don't think this course is going to be any easier because of that fact.
• CHEM 200 Physical Chemistry. So far I think this course is all about manipulating/differentiating/integrating all kinds of crazy equations that try to improve on PV=nRT, which, we have already drilled into our brains from the first few lectures, is useless for REAL gases.

There are 6 courses on there, but on the bright side, no labs, so I still consider that a win. My optimism might fade by midterm-time, but until then, life's good! My life consists of going to classes, hitting the awesome gym, potlucking with friends, and of course, never ending studying and homework.

My goal this semester is to agonize as little as possible, by which I mean I plan to do things the easy way instead of the hard way whenever possible. So I intend to spend more time working with other people and asking for help and less time agonizing alone.

Yay for efficiency!

We'll see how this goes.

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...

Canadian Wildlife: Dr. Geist lecture

On a whim, I attended a lecture given by Dr. Valerius Geist about the future of Canadian wildlife, which was extremely interesting. Dr. Geist is very engaging and approachable.  So much that I even started taking notes on a topic on which I know basically nothing.
A few points:

• The need to keep wildlife as a public resource, so it does not turn into a private plaything for the elite (as it has been in other places).  This 2009 article, The Peasant Wars, has some great quotes:
  
  
  
  “The miracle of North American conservation is that it is basically a blue-collar system, grounded in the political and financial support and the active participation of large numbers of middle-class citizens who bring their basic honesty and decency to bear on important issues. This is just the opposite of the elitist system that has existed throughout Europe for centuries and is spreading like cancer around the world today, even right here at home.
  “Because of the democratic nature of American hunting and wildlife management, and the demands for accountability it implies, our system has worked miracles in returning wildlife to a continent that, just a hundred years ago, saw the near-extinction of most big game animals and other wildlife. In my mind, this represents the world’s greatest environmental achievement of the last century.”
  “Take away wildlife or make it irrelevant to the citizen, and wildlife winds up as private property, jealously defended. There is good reason for this as wildlife is a creator of wealth and privilege and thus very valuable.
  Currently, simple-minded efforts to spread and multiply wolves lead to a depletion of wildlife – severe enough to lose the hunting public and with that the passion for wildlife. And with that it moves very surely into private ownership.
  “And when wolves, grizzly bears and cougars are private property, the public has no say over their fate. I need not emphasize that even in North America the de facto grasp for wildlife by large land owners has led to the defense of that wildlife against the public with force of arms."
• 
  
  Game farming is another step in the wrong direction.
  
  
  
  • Destroys wildlife as the first step is domestication. Animals are bred to be placid and lose fear; domestication is not a conditioned response - it is genetic.
• Large handlers create a trophy market. However, large antlers are only seen on bulls in the wild who don't breed... so from a farming perspective, this doesn't make a lot of sense. This is also seen in bison farming, where they are bred for trophies and to resemble large cows for the choice cuts of meat.
• Quickly become centres of disease and pathogens, which soon become bridges of transmission to other animals and humans. Elk farming resulted in predicted epidemics of bovine tuberculosis and chronic wasting disease in the 1990s. CWD is particularly worrisome as it is transmitted via fluids and can jump species.
• Dr. Geist is quoted in an article from 2000 in The Atlantic, Money Game, which discusses game farming from a more financial perspective, but also addresses the same biological and health concerns.
• Wolves
• Traditionally considered vermin and actively hunted and killed, but became protected and idolized by conservation groups. Populations are increasing rapidly to the point where there are scarcely any deer left.
• Have no natural predators, like cougars.
• Will interbreed with any canine, like coyotes and domesticated dogs.
• Geist suggests a need to curb this population as soon as possible. Because they breed so quickly, killing 80% of the population would be required just to maintain status quo.
• Wolves/coyotes/canines carry and spread hydatid disease, also known as echinococcosis. This is one nasty parasite for which there is no treatment other than surgical removal of cysts and chemotherapy. (Geist reported a 90% infection rate for the wolf population - I didn't get the details on which one.) The eggs are in their feces and are easily transmitted through the air or liquids to dogs and humans.  This parasite is no joke. I didn't need to see some of the pictures that I happened to run across. Ugh.
• Dr. Geist knows of no case where humans and wolves co-existed.
• Are becoming a danger to livestock and humans, as their natural prey are running out. In light of the death of a student attacked and killed by wolves, his article: Where Wolves Have Become Common, sums up these issues nicely.
• The January 2010 issue of The Outdoorsman also provides quite a lot of information about the concern of hydatid disease. It's quite disconcerting.

Very interesting. Also, a little unsettling.

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.

The Homestretch

It's hard to believe I'm going to be home in just over a month, by which time all midterms, labs, and final exams will have been announced, agonized over, studied for, and written. (And passed, of course.)
In the meantime, I'm getting homesick. Although I've been very lucky with residence and roommates, I miss my family and friends. And food. I definitely miss good food with good company. Being on a student budget, I don't get to go out much here (and for other reasons explained here).
But it's okay, because I'll be home soon.
As my brother says, "this means you're almost 1/8th done!" I'm not sure whether to feel this is a great accomplishment or if I've just barely started. The latter, I think. 
I can't wait until this semester is over! 
Honestly, though, it's been pretty good. I've never been completely overwhelmed (lots of time for that later, I'm sure), and I've been filling my brain with good new stuff, which on the large scale of things is always fun.
On that note, I better get on that chemistry lab report.

Physics update

Good news. I passed the physics midterm... with a whopping 57%. This would normally be terrible, but in this case, the class average was 50%. So really, it's not so bad. 
In fact, I feel pretty jubilant about both passing PLUS beating the class average.
:)

Ginger oatmeal flax spice cookie bars

The "Cornerstore" on campus sells large, individually packaged cookies which are very tasty, and very expensive ($1.50 each). I can't remember the brand but I know they are locally-made. At first I scoffed at the price, but on closer inspection, the flavours intrigued me so much that I caved in. Cookies that I have eaten or want to eat:

• Ginger flax cookie - chunks of crystallized ginger, molasses, flax, rye flakes. They also used canola oil, which I felt made it tasty kind of greasy. I enjoyed the chewy texture and the "healthiness" of it, but felt I could do better. More on that below.
• Lemon poppyseed - like the muffin, but in cookie form. No complaints but not a favourite. More crumbly than chewy, tending more towards a shortbread.
• Green tea cookie - green tea, dried cranberries, possibly some nuts, (I nibbled on this during a lecture so I wasn't paying attention), and a chunk of chocolate in the middle. This one was tasty and I'd consider buying another one.
• Hot! chocolate - a spicy chocolate chip chocolate cookie! Ooo. I haven't seen this again since the one day I happened to notice it, so I'm waiting impatiently for them to come in again so I can try one.

To take a break from doing chemistry and physics homework yesterday, I did some research online and came up with my own recipe for a better version of the ginger flax cookie. Of course, I'm too lazy to dole out cookie dough on multiple cookie sheets, and plus, I only have one sheet, so I decided to make bars instead, using a combination of recipes I found online and hoping for the best. My roommate said I was brave to invent baking recipes, having screwed up too many recipes. What can I say - I bake on the edge. Well, not really. But in the end, they turned out very nicely indeed. (Unlike this photo taken by my phone camera, which is pretty bad.) 

Sweet, chewy, soft, and full of autumny flavours: ginger, cinnamon, cloves, apples.
And now, about the recipe. 

• It is quite heavy on the crystallized ginger, but I feel that their natural chewiness makes them perfect for bars. There is quite a bit of sugar on them already, so I didn't need to add any extra - only a little honey, since I needed a little extra moistness. 
• You'd think with all the oats and flax that they'll turn out like a granola bar, but there are enough other cookie-dough ingredients that make them turn out very oatmeal-cookie-ish in texture. 
• Instead of gross tasting canola, I used a combination of applesauce and butter. Mostly applesauce, really, since these are all oatmeally and healthy. But a little bit of butter is always necessary for that je ne sais quoi in baked goods.
• As a side note, it seems I can't seem to stop making bulleted lists anymore. But you gotta admit, they do make for easier reading...

Ginger oatmeal flax spice cookie bars

Dry:

1.5 cups old fashioned (big flakes) rolled oats

3/4 cup flax meal

1.5 cup whole wheat flour

1 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp ground cloves

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp baking powder

1 cup crystallized ginger, chopped

3/4 tsp salt

Wet:

1/2 cup unsweetened applesauce

1 egg

1/4 cup butter

1/4 cup honey

2 tsp vanilla extract

1. Mix dry ingredients together. And preheat the oven to 350 F.

2. Make a well and add wet ingredients.

3. Mix well with a spatula and/or hands.

4. Press tightly into an appropriately-sized greased pan (I think mine was 8" by 8"). 

5. Bake for about 25 minutes or until the edges start to brown a little.

6. I cut this into pieces while it was still warm, though they aren't hard, so it probably doesn't matter.

More pictures of UNBC

It's really a beautiful campus. I have never seen so much green and so many trees on a university campus before. I love it - so far - my attitude may change in a few months when winter comes along.

Morning fog in the parking lot

Slightly less foggy with more cars

Part of that green sign says that snowboarding is not allowed. Just one indication that I'm not going to enjoy winter in Prince George.

Foggy path from the gym to the rest of campus.

Same spot, about an hour later. Oooooo.

Studying... Snacking... Sleeping

It's only been 2 weeks, and despite my best efforts to stay active, the result of sitting on my butt most of every day is making itself known to me: my jeans are definitely tighter. I fear that working out almost daily is not enough to combat the munchies + sitting in lectures 4 hours/day.

One problem, which I think should be the topic of someone's grad thesis, is the directly proportional relationship between studying and snacking. The more I study, the more I get the munchies. And it's not a matter of being hungry at all - I just desperately crave tastiness in my mouth. (This is a very slippery slope.) For example, last night I inhaled a bagel - didn't bother toasting it or anything. And between lectures, I feel a strong need to eat something. So I usually do - but I think I'm going to put an end to this starting tomorrow. 

Also, studying takes a lot out of me. I'm getting 8 hours of sleep a night, and I feel I could use even more. I figure my brain is requiring extra cataloguing and info-absorption time, and so far, I've been happy to oblige.

UNBC campus

The beautiful campus (see pictures below) is on a gigantic hill on the edge of Prince George. I'm not kidding about the giganticness of this hill. Google Maps tells me it should take about 40 minutes to walk to the bottom, and then at least another 10 minutes to get to the nearest strip mall or other useful place. That makes it essentially NOT walking distance to anywhere. 

Luckily, it is fairly well serviced by 4 main bus routes - however, the buses stop running around 9pm, so no nightlife for us students, unless you're willing to pay for a taxi.

Pretty buildings on campus around dusk

The edge of campus, looking off the hill towards the mountains.

Healthcare in Prince George

It has come to my attention that for non-PG students, healthcare here stinks.
There are 2 options:

• Campus clinic. The doctor is in 2 half-days per week.
• The only walk-in-clinic in PG. I was told to avoid going here by a PG resident because you might end up waiting 6 hours or longer, and there's a good chance you may get hypothermia while doing so.

Okay, there's a third option - if you are dying, you can go to the ER at the hospital. This is usually not the case for most of us.
And that's it. Period.
I called a slew of doctor's offices to see if I could book an appointment outside of those options. Half of them were closed down (weird), and the other half are not accepting new patients. So then, I called the hospital to get a list of doctors accepting new patients, and guess what? The list is empty.
Great.
If you're a family medicine doctor, can you move to Prince George, please?

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.

UNBC Day 3

The boxes have been packed, moved, and unpacked, the room mates have been introduced, and the tearful goodbyes have been given. Now what?
Blog for a while, I guess. Not much else to do other than eat.
Here are some (terrible phone) pictures of what our place in residence looks like:

 

Little hall into my room

 View outside my window backing onto the forest. This is very nice and very quiet.

 

Living room. No TV yet.

 

Kitchen. Microwave coming soon!

 

2 sinks

 The shower and toilet have their own entrances. This is a great idea.

Before I have more time to ponder/wallow in my temporary loneliness, I'm going to go to the gym.

5 more days to UNBC

I am moving myself and all my swag to residence in 5 days to start a new career for the next few years: life as an engineering student.


It's funny how this seemed like such a wonderful remote idea 6 months ago when I decided to apply. It's still a good idea now, of course - just scarier now that it's being realized. You can't go too wrong with more education. There are much worse things to do other than not work.


The thought of leaving all friends and family to go somewhere where I know nobody? 
Then: "No big deal - it's only temporary." 
Now: "Oh dear." 
But hey, with the Internets, you're never alone, right? We've always got msn messenger.


Also, if I think of this in terms of being a new adventure, I feel a lot better. UNBC, here I come!


And don't worry, everyone! I won't turn into one of those engineers. I promise.