The last thee days have been just as aweful as I anticipated. 14-18 hour days in Mudd trying to do all the tests that still needed to be done and figure out why the wind turbine didn't work. And then there was the final report which i was in charge of compiling that meant that every time I got into my own work, i'd have to stop to fit someone else's section into the framework and then edit and then go back with comments for them and then make sure they changed it..... it was exhausting. There was just so much to do and even though I knew it would all get done, i've still been flat out since sunday.
Even yesterday, which I expected to be at least a little relaxing was stressful. I thought we'd turn in our paper at noon and then people would come look at our giant blue wind turbine. Instead, I was still working on the paper at 2 and at 2:30 around 25 or 30 judges showed up. Some of them just came over, looked, wrote down a grade and left but many of them asked questions, some of them nicely and some of them not so nicely. Some of them would tell us about their columbia careers (there were a lot of old columbia alums) but some of them would rip us apart. They'd point out flaws in our design or tests we should have done or question us about the physics of it. After 2.5 hours of that, I was exhausted. If i had to explain one more time that the reason it wasn't generating much energy was because we were only putting it in front of 7 ft^2 of wind when the turbine swept out an area of 36 ft^2 I might have screamed. By the way, that's only one of many reasons why it didn't work as well as planned, but my team totally convinced ourselves that the design was perfect and only the wind was lacking. In our defense, we did everything we set out to do: we built a wind turbine that generates energy. It's not important that it only generates half a watt.
Compared to other projects, I think we did really well. Our project wasn't quite as complicated as some but it was pretty respectable and we were one of only two groups that actually had their thing entirely working. One group of total slackers was still building during the expo, like machining and designing. We had ours done last thursday. It was amazing looking around at noon and realizing that we were the only ones not tinkering with anything (except the report).
The team dinner last night was a lot of fun too. I'm glad they just handed us presents at the end. I remember last year people read mara and lesser poems which were awesome but i think i would have been entirely too embarressed to appreciate them. The presents are also awesome. I now have a disc with me on it! how awesome is that? And i love the books of pictures because i take so few myself. I need to rely on other people for my memories.
One day of rest and then to virginia on friday and then studying starts hard core. Even today i can't really rest. Too much on the to-do list.
Even yesterday, which I expected to be at least a little relaxing was stressful. I thought we'd turn in our paper at noon and then people would come look at our giant blue wind turbine. Instead, I was still working on the paper at 2 and at 2:30 around 25 or 30 judges showed up. Some of them just came over, looked, wrote down a grade and left but many of them asked questions, some of them nicely and some of them not so nicely. Some of them would tell us about their columbia careers (there were a lot of old columbia alums) but some of them would rip us apart. They'd point out flaws in our design or tests we should have done or question us about the physics of it. After 2.5 hours of that, I was exhausted. If i had to explain one more time that the reason it wasn't generating much energy was because we were only putting it in front of 7 ft^2 of wind when the turbine swept out an area of 36 ft^2 I might have screamed. By the way, that's only one of many reasons why it didn't work as well as planned, but my team totally convinced ourselves that the design was perfect and only the wind was lacking. In our defense, we did everything we set out to do: we built a wind turbine that generates energy. It's not important that it only generates half a watt.
Compared to other projects, I think we did really well. Our project wasn't quite as complicated as some but it was pretty respectable and we were one of only two groups that actually had their thing entirely working. One group of total slackers was still building during the expo, like machining and designing. We had ours done last thursday. It was amazing looking around at noon and realizing that we were the only ones not tinkering with anything (except the report).
The team dinner last night was a lot of fun too. I'm glad they just handed us presents at the end. I remember last year people read mara and lesser poems which were awesome but i think i would have been entirely too embarressed to appreciate them. The presents are also awesome. I now have a disc with me on it! how awesome is that? And i love the books of pictures because i take so few myself. I need to rely on other people for my memories.
One day of rest and then to virginia on friday and then studying starts hard core. Even today i can't really rest. Too much on the to-do list.
posted by influx @ 10:29 AM
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