Back at The Beach

I finished my second week of the new semester at Long Beach.

My classes are Monday/Wednesday 3:30-4:45 and Tuesday/Thursday nights 6-9:45. This is great because I do not have to sit around campus with nothing to do for hours on end. I also get to miss most of the heavy traffic driving there and back. Like most people at Long Beach, I have no class on Fridays.

My three classes are Electric Control of Motors, Analog Circuits II, and Microcontrollers. The first two classes are taught by one of my professors from last semester. I like his teaching style and he knows I am a great student so everyone is happy. The motors class is the continuation of a class I liked in the fall, so it should be good. The analog circuits class might be trouble. It is a detailed examination of circuit elements like transistors and how they make complex circuits. The professor said it is one of the hardest undergraduate electrical engineering classes. While most people took the prerequisite for class last year, I took an equivalent prerequisite five years ago.

My third class, Microcontrollers, has a large programming component. I think most of it will be in assembly, which I have used before but not written. This will be my first real programming class, though I have taken a few fake programming classes before. If I can easily get away with copying and pasting the example code to do all the work, it is a fake programming class. The professor has a dry sense of humor, which I enjoy. However, he can make things harder than they need to be. For the first prelab, he had everyone make flowcharts, truth tables, and find a path through a maze (which must be computer drawn). I thought the teaching style of giving more work than necessary was left behind in high school, but I was wrong. It only took me a couple of hours to find a flowchart program online, download it, learn it, and make the required graphic. In that amount of time I could have written the program itself in C. It is great to plan things out before coding, but requiring that layer of work is beneath a junior level class for electrical engineers.

People I know
My classes have a few faces I recognize from last semester. As expected, an infamous person is in a couple of them. On the first day of class, she looked exactly the way I wanted to forget her, wearing the same grey and black shirt, off-white sweatshirt, and jeans she wore on our date. We still talk in class, but things are different. There is no excitement in seeing or talking to her.

The good news is I ran into my two friends I wanted to see. One of them even suggested we do our masters project together, which would be awesome.

When one of my professors (the good one) saw my schedule, he said I would be busy this semester. If I spend enough time doing work and learning things, this will be a great semester.