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April 11, 2005

School Roundup

Ah, so the quarter, how is it going? Quite well, thanks for asking. Not that you did, of course, but I have my little fantasies.

I'm enjoying my studio immensely, with fun projects, an engaged and interesting teacher, and a decent set of classmates. My studio teacher last quarter told me that I should expect to lose about 2 classmates every quarter, and even more over the summer, for the next couple years, but you could still colour me chocked that one of my classmates dropped out last week. We're in a studio most students would kill to be in, after all.

Other classes: environmental control systems, which right now is all about siting and weather. Interesting, although apparently I am the only one of my classmates who has any idea what relative humidity is. We learned that in 7th grade science, after all.

Also architectural history, which looks to be a cake walk as it's all essay and no memorization, thank goodness. The other students are preturbed because memorization tests are easy to fake your way out of; essay tests require you to actually be able to think and process what you have learned. They actually prove you know what you are supposed to, which is why I prefer them.

Structures this quarter is interesting. The first two quarters of engineering are shared with the structural engineers, so they basically kick your ass up and down the Dexter Lawn. Now the Construction Management students and Architecture students branch off into "structural systems for architects," which turns out to be something along the lines of "structures for babies." After doing detailed load tracing and shear calculations last quarter, we began this quarter with this moment:

Teacher: When you stand on the floor, where does your weight go?

Class: Silence

Teacher: It goes through the building to the ground.

OK, this should not be too hard. We've already learned a couple of ways of cheating on the calculations; the poor structural engineers have to suffer over method of joints and so forth and we can just approximate. Ha ha ha. I had this brief moment last quarter of thinking maybe I should change majors to engineering, but now? No way. Structures for babies is way more my speed right now.

Of course, I'm bored to death, but I think I will start working on some weird art projects to get that out of my system.

Posted by ayse on 04/11/05 at 9:31 PM