29
2009
An Update, Rant
The past six months have seen big change for me. I’ll attribute the craziness to my lack of posting anything here, though I admit Facebook sure makes it easier to post quick items I want the world* to see.
* Actually just a group of people that have solidified their friendship with me by clicking a button
From January through April, I endured the toughest semester of school in my five-year stay at Northeastern. It was also my last semester. Instead of fondly waving goodbye to me as I left, Northeastern gave me the finger.
For starters, there was Capstone – the culmination of my time in the Civil Engineering department in which groups of four or five are tasked with a major design project that they must see through from conception to final design. Pretty important, eh? Apparently not important enough to warrant an English-speaking professor with at least one year of experience at the university that isn’t distracted by an $8M grant he had just been awarded.
I’m not going to bore you with the details – primarily because I don’t want to relive them – but my shear frustration was palpable. Couple that with the less-than-ideal groupwork that I had to deal with and a final product that I’d say was pretty good, I should have received an A for effort alone. But somehow I ended up with an A-. Sure, I accepted this in Elementary Hebrew freshman year with a professor slightly short of kind, but when it is widely known that anything less than an A in Capstone indicates a significant deficiency, you can imagine how I felt. Although, what did I really expect when my professor made a comment after our final presentation that all but revealed he hadn’t taken a single look at the more-than-dozen proposal and design drafts we submitted to him?
And then there was Steel Bridge. I was finally in charge of it all and had by far the most design experience and coursework to warrant the job. I put more time into the design of the bridge than anyone had put in any of the three previous bridges combined. It was fantastic… on paper. Fabrication went just OK during the Spring, providing me with the prime example of engineers not considering well enough how things will actually turn out. The result wasn’t bad by any means, but not quite what was on paper. We tested the bridge to check for compliance and headed to the regional competition. (We actually walked there; it was at Wentworth and literally closer to my dorm than most of my own campus.)
This is the first year that the guidelines of the bridge have changed drastically, so it was interesting to see how everyone else designed. There were some fantastic looking bridges. I knew it would be a close one before we even got to strut our stuff. We built our bridge in record time (a big plus for the competition), and it went on to be tested. We had a dimension violation not previously there before the day, and we failed the lateral load test – something that had passed on every test we made ahead of time. This is heavily penalized, so I knew we were done then. Our whole team, several faculty members, and a slew of students who had come to support us (afterall, it was so close to campus) watched as our design – the one I am responsible for – failed and put us in the worst ranking we had seen in five years. Perhaps it wouldn’t have been quite as bad had my emotional self been to able to contain the true feelings I had in that moment. But, alas, I cried. Just one of those things, I suppose.
But despite these downfalls, I graduated. Luckily my grades didn’t reflect well the hell I went through, so I graduated in pretty good standings, too.
I spent the next few weeks sorting through the objects that defined my life, deciding which were still important enough to have with me, which I didn’t need but wanted to save, and those that I knew I wouldn’t miss. With a week-long trip to Los Angeles to break up the month, I packed my things to get ready for Cincinnati.
And a month ago, I loaded my things into a Penske (not quite the same ring as saying I loaded them into a U-Haul), and took off with my parents and Amanda on the road to Cincinnati. Since then, I’ve been working during the day and unpacking/organization in the meantime. Though she flew back to Boston soon after we got here, Amanda will be joining me in August (along with Abby, a 12-week-old Feist puppy), thus beginning a new part of my life.
I am officially a “roller coaster engineer” (how cool is that to say?) at Great Coasters International and sharing the new experience with my amazing girlfriend of 4+ years. It’s obvious that the past several years have been leading up to this point – for more reasons that one – but now that it’s here, it is more exciting than I anticipated. Amanda isn’t even here yet, but the “knowing” part of it all, just makes it fantastic.
So as I look out at my fantastic view of the Ohio River from my 20th-story luxury apartment in downtown Cincinnati, a feeling of relaxation and contentment strike me more powerfully than I had imagined for the previous five years. I’ll miss my family, my friends, and the places I’ve called home over the past 23 years, but this is an adventure. I know everything will be fine.
|
Comments
