Fall 2021: Semester Summary
Fall 2021 was actually a great semester for me! Returning to a more normal semester reminded me why I loved my first year at Smith as much as I did. To read more about my first-year experience, check out my master list of blog posts. Being back in the classroom with my peers was something I missed a lot last year. Furthermore, from an educational standpoint, hands-on labs with the instructor physically present are much more fun and effective. One of my favorite things about Smith is our house system, which just didn’t translate to Zoom. Admittedly it was still a challenging semester to be starting out as a first-year and for many of our returning students.
This semester I was one of the House Community Advisors (HCAs) of Washburn House. I really enjoyed moving to Washburn because it allowed me to return to Green Street and also stay with the folks I got to know last year in Parsons House. Washburn is conveniently located right next to the newly renovated Neilson Library and Seelye Hall (home to a number of classes, self-scheduled exams, and some printers). Washburn also has all new furniture, a kitchen, air conditioning, and a spacious living room.
I came into this fall following an amazing internship at Microsoft and before that a really challenging spring semester. My internship experience in many ways shifted the way I see my future. Before my internship, I figured that I’d go straight to graduate school to study either computer engineering or robotics. After the internship, I began to see a career in software engineering as an exciting alternate path. While I’m still keeping my options open, this semester’s coursework has only further increased my interest in software engineering.
While the vast majority of this post will be dedicated to a discussion of my fall 2021 courses, you may also be interested in reading about non-academic things I did this semester. Noteworthy events included Mountain Day, Halloween, and Celebration. Additionally, I attended fun terrarium and soldering workshops.
As a junior, I loved getting to tailor my courses to my specific interests within both engineering and computer science. While I’ve liked my past classes they were for the most part required core courses. One thing I enjoyed about my major classes is that they all had a programming component and each used different programming languages! To read more about the languages I used this semester, check out my post on computer programming learning resources.
The course I was most excited about at the start of the semester was advanced digital circuits (EGR 390dc), which ultimately was the class I found to be the least interesting. Furthermore, while working with the Arduinos for the lab portion of the class I continually found myself gravitating towards the coding part as opposed to building out the physical circuit.
For our final project, we created an Etch A Sketch of sorts using an LED dot matrix and an analog joystick. Our project had two modes of operation: move point and sketch. In the move point mode, the lit-up LED moves around the screen as controlled by the joystick. In sketch mode, the path stays lit up allowing the user to draw out designs.
On the flip side, I was least excited about signals and systems (EGR 320), which ended up probably being my favorite class. I think I was initially less interested in this course because I knew it was going to be a very math-intensive course. Granted while I did enjoy the course content, that’s not what made it an awesome class. Rather, it was the combination of a great professor, strong organization, rigor, and an awesome group of six junior engineers. Additionally, I left having learned a tremendous amount. I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised though because I had a similar experience last semester with math methods (PHY 210). Pictured below is the equipment we used for our EKG lab. Like in digital circuits, my favorite part of our labs was the programming. In fact, for our echo cancellation, I did extra programming just for the fun of it.
As for my computer science classes, they were both a lot of fun and helped me grow my skill set as a web developer. In my software engineering class (CSC 223), we learned the entire software development process and used Ruby on Rails to build a bike-sharing web application which you can read more about here.
In my other computer science class, advanced programming techniques (CSC 220), we learned and used HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP. For the final project, I built a calendar application completely from scratch. One advantage to these project-based classes was that I had a light finals week as project presentations take place during the last week of classes. (I did also have an actual final exam in signals and systems on Tuesday of this week).
To round out my schedule I also took a few low-stress one and two-credit electives. My favorite elective was savoring Italy (ITL 205). The course consisted of engaging lectures about Italian culture and cuisine. I also took an environmental lecture series course (ENX 100) and a self-paced fitness class (ESS 945sp). I wasn’t particularly fond of my environmental class, but my fitness class was more fun than I’d anticipated as we got to go rock climbing, play tennis, and do a scavenger hunt. One benefit to my fitness class is that it got me out exploring the local bike trails.
