08.08.08

Holy Molly it’s been two weeks. =\

It’s not really hard guess­ing why I’m even updat­ing today. Just look at the URL of this post, it’s so pretty! =)

Coin­ci­den­tally, it has been a week since my new semes­ter in degree started. Yes! I’m now offi­cially a stu­dent of a Bach­e­lor of Engi­neer­ing degree in Robot­ics and Mecha­tron­ics. A mouth­ful, ain’t it?

I chose a path in Mecha­tron­ics because well, I came into Swin­burne aim­ing for that course. Blog­ging about it pre­vi­ously helped me realise that. So many things hap­pened in the past year some­how derailed me off that orig­i­nal course I set out to take. That’s why they say it always help once a while to stop, look around and re-evaluate your path.

There is another rea­son why I opted for Mecha­tron­ics. A cliched as it my sound, it is vaguely because it is the road less taken, at least in this part of the world. Any engi­neer­ing stu­dent can tell you, the bulk of stu­dents are in Civil and noth­ing else. Granted, there are def­i­nitely more Civil jobs out there than Mecha­tron­ics, but the thought that I have to com­pete with that whole lot in Civil doesn’t sound all that wel­com­ing to me.

It doesn’t help that yes, I suck in competition.

Well I wish I could say that I’m just test­ing the waters but, its a deci­sion that’s hard to turn back to. I don’t regret my choice, in fact, I’m begin­ning my slow, grad­ual men­tal con­di­tion­ing to have myself embrace this whole 4-year path I’ve laid in front of me — with passion.

The only, big, glar­ing down­side to being in Mecha­tron­ics is.. none of my imme­di­ate friends are with me. =( Hav­ing spent my foun­da­tion with the com­pany of a few great bud­dies, it strucked me pretty hard dur­ing the degree enroll­ments, being alone, sud­denly deprived of my cir­cle of friends.

For­tu­nately, when lec­tures started, I realised that I wasn’t going to spend the next 4 years a lone ranger. =P Turns out most of the lec­tures are held in com­bi­na­tion with engi­neer­ing stu­dents from other spe­cial­i­sa­tions. So in a way, the engi­neer­ing sub­jects we’re tak­ing for the first year are com­mon to all engi­neer­ing courses.

Another glar­ing dif­fer­ence we’re hav­ing this semes­ter is that out of the four sub­jects we have, three of our lec­tur­ers are Indi­ans. One of them, in par­tic­u­lar, stood out in stark con­trast to the other lec­tur­ers. Our Engi­neer­ing Math­e­mat­ics 1 lec­turer, Ms. Seibu, gave a very moti­va­tional intro­duc­tion to the sub­ject that other day.

She started her lec­ture with the quote so com­monly known yet so lit­tle embraced: “

Unlike, face it, most of the lec­tur­ers we have today who’d guide you through­out the semes­ter as far as scor­ing in the finals is con­cerned, Ms Seibu stressed a lot on the impor­tance of Math in the Engi­neer­ing course as a whole. She even advised us to treat this par­tic­u­lar Math sub­ject as a lit­mus test to gauge how well are we gonna cope the degree.

Her charis­matic and witty lec­tures, unique and in-depth way of teach­ing had me worry less about scor­ing in this sub­ject I had so much trou­ble dur­ing Foun­da­tion. Even more, we’ll be hav­ing our great Ms. Chong as the tutor for this sub­ject! Woots! =D

Well I hope I can go on.. but time is a lit­tle tight right now. It’s mov­ing week next week where the shift to the new extended cam­pus is expected to take place. As a result, there won’t be any lec­tures next week before we resume lec­tures in the new cam­pus. =) It’s still going to be a busy week for me though, as I jug­gle with a few projects I have on hand.

By the way, happy 08 08 08! You might already have noticed that I have whipped up a Bei­jing olympics themed header. Weee!

Welp, here’s to the next four years of my degree!

*crosses fin­gers*

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