Year One
The first year: the year stuffed full of new experiences, activities, people, and lifestyles to get acclimated to. This is the year where suddenly nothing feels familiar and everything needs attention. Being in a new environment allows the possibility to start over, to reinvent oneself, and to decide how the future is going to look. Here is a brief look at my first year.
Autumn Quarter
Math Midterm One
Throughout my life, I never had any difficulty in math class. However, I always knew that the day would come where it would get difficult. I had not realized how suddenly and without warning that day would come. Shown below is my grade for my first midterm. Despite the challenges that the 13x series threw at me, it forced me to quickly learn note-taking, study habits, and the utilization of resources that surrounded me at UW.
Move In Day
September twenty-second marked the first day I lived on my own. This advancement introduced a host of new challenges to become acclimated to. With independence comes the responsibility to eat regularly, go to bed on time, clean the room, do the laundry, wash the dishes, and get outside every once in a while. Also, I had to learn to live in extremely close quarters with another person, practicing courtesy, respecting boundaries, and maintaining cleanliness.
Socialization Nation (Maple Hall)
Coming to a new city followed by only 3 people from my high school, I knew that I would have to make a pretty big effort into socialization and making connections. What I had failed to realize, is that almost everyone around me was having the exact same thought. Those first few weeks on campus during Dawg Daze and Syllabus week was a windstorm of introductions, meetups, and social media handles. The most memorable event for me was when I was walking by the 7th floor lounge on the first night and suddenly found myself in the middle of a >20 person game of Uno. After, we took a tour of campus at around 1 or 2 in the morning. As this was my first exposure to campus, it was a little disorienting but I eventually got the hang of it. Someone for the group set me up on the Maple Hall discord which was extremely active in the first few weeks and contributed to many meetups and friendships. After a few weeks however, everyone found satisfaction in the friends they had made and went back to their shyness that they were comfortable with (me included).
My first quarter at UW has been much more of a challenge than I had expected going into it. Early in my life, there was no shortage of people, teachers, parents telling me that college was going to be a lot different than high school. I did not believe them. I had never really struggled academically in high school but I did struggle socially, so I figured my biggest challenge would be the social aspect of living in a brand new city. Much to my surprise, it was the opposite. What I had failed to consider was that every single other person would also be worried about making friends, so there was no shortage of people looking to meet new people. I had rather easily found a good group of friends and was pleasantly surprised. Then school started. Having only five total classes and at most three a day, I had expected to have loads of free time. I was wrong. On my first day of sitting in math 134, I immediately found myself lost. My math homework was taking two hours a question which totaled up to spending 24 hours a week on math homework alone. The class was incredibly difficult for me, both academically and mentally. Never before had I expected to be so lost in math. Math had been my comfort subject all those years prior. After having been so overwhelmed by math I feared going to chemistry. Chemistry has always been my least favorite of the sciences; I like to work with things I can see rather than guess about the microscopic. Once again, thinking I was going to have more difficulty in chemistry, my expectations were flipped on their head. The content of the course itself was surprisingly easy to understand. I found myself often taking a break from my math homework by doing some Aleks. In the first week I was four weeks ahead on Aleks because of how often I got frustrated with math. However, chemistry still consumed a large amount of time, time of which seemed to be rapidly weaning. On top of all my classes, I was now responsible for feeding myself, cleaning, doing the laundry, and shopping. It felt like a lot at once. I found myself having maybe a half of a day a week to do something that I didn’t have to do. The ambitious plans I had coming into the school year to read, practice the piano, and go to the gym dissolved. As time went on, I did begin to form something resembling a rhythm. The regular adult responsibilities became second hand nature, chemistry became something I didn’t have to worry about, and I began exploring my resources for math. I joined a few study groups, became active on online group chats, and started attending office hours. I still didn’t feel 100% confident in my ability to navigate the class but I did feel better. Now that I have begun to acclimate to this new environment I have confidence that with each passing quarter I will become more and more comfortable with whatever gets thrown my way.
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Winter Quarter
Design Build Fly
Early in the year I joined Design Build Fly, a club that builds airplanes for competition. At the beginning of my journey in design build fly I was placed in the Aerospace sub team. The Aerospace sub team worked mostly on designing the aircraft breaking the team into groups to work on individual components. I had very little experience in Aerodynamics. I had taken the PLTW Aerospace engineering class but that was little enough preparation that everything was new and over my head. I didn't contribute very much but I did learn a lot. I was on the tail team and the wind tunnel team. However, we could not reserve a spot for the wind tunnel in fall quarter so after the preparations were made I made an early move to manufacturing as most of the Aerospace team does as the design wraps up. In manufacturing I was much more in my element as I had several years of shop experience and was looking forward to actually building things in college. Overall, I felt that manufacturing was a better fit for me as I actually contributed. I spent several hours in the shop every week and gained a pretty good understanding of the manufacturing process behind the plane. At the end of winter quarter the wind tunnel was finally reserved and we did some retrospective tests. We were in the 3x3 wind tunnel in the aerodynamics lab. The wind tunnel requires a lot of safety training so now I am qualified for a bunch of random things like working around asbestos, in confined spaces, and with class 4 lasers. I plan on becoming much more involved in DBF in the future hoping to becoming a project lead for my experiential learning.
The Machine Shop
In high school I had the opportunity to work in the shop a lot in my engineering classes. I really appreciated the chance to actually get hands-on experience and build something. My favorite part of engineering is the part where you actually get to mess around with prototypes and see your design come to fruition. Seeking deeper experiences in college, I threw myself into manufacturing at DBF and signed up to be trained for the ME prototype shop. I later hope to take ME 354 or ME 355 to get a much more in depth understanding of manufacturing. In my training I was taught how to use the standard machinery as well as specialized training for the mill and the lathe. I also really want to get trained for the 8's wood shop as well as at the Mill.
Whiteboards
Over Winter Quarter I discovered that doing my work on whiteboards really helps me. I ordered a pack of multicolored dry-erase markers off of amazon and tried to work in the study lounges where there are whiteboards as much as possible. Before I had known I didn't like to work at a desk and like to be strewn about the floor. I now very much appreciate that I have found a new system of studying that works better for me. I like to be able to be up and move around. I like the larger workspace that allows me to better see everything I'm doing. I like to pace while I work on a particularly hard problem. I also discovered that chalkboards worked well too but are much more messy. Unfortunately leading up to finals week of winter quarter (and all of spring quarter) there were never any available study lounges in Maple Hall. I think next year I'll get a somewhat large whiteboard for my room to circumvent my need for an empty space.
Spring Quarter
DBF
Having enjoyed my time in Design Build Fly the first two quarters, my involvement in the club continued to increase. I was invited to go to the competition in Wichita. I was one of three people invited who was not either flight critical or part of the lead team. The lead team was looking to invite promising underclassmen because due to Covid, no one had been to competition before and we wanted to make sure there were always people in the club who had experience with competition. I hope to apply for manufacturing lead next year and hope to spend as much time as possible in the shop in preparation for that.
Interview
I was in Honors 212 B, "What Does Art Do?: Understanding Caribbean and Gulf Coast Embodied Oral History and Performing Arts Expressions through the Humanities" this quarter. The title really says it all. Our Final project was to make a digital storytelling item that described Caribbean or Gulf Coast culture through experiential learning. I chose to interview the Son Cubano musician Kiki Valera. Kiki is one of the most popular Son Cubano musicians making this one of the coolest things I've done for a school project. After the first hour I had finished the parts I needed for the project and continued to talk for an hour just learning about Son Cubano music. At the end he even got me started on learning how to play Son Cubano.
