Time to take a breather...

Oh my goodness... what a week this has been! The month of April has turned out to be the busiest of my college career. I guess that shouldn't come as a surprise, since I am a graduating senior in engineering. I'm almost there, but still have two pretty insane weeks left. Unfortunately, from the looks of things, my remaining time at Auburn will follow in the exponentially increasing "amount-of-work-per-day" trend. (I have so much work to finish by graduation, I get queasy whenever I think about it!)

On the bright side, though, I've gotten a couple of the major milestones out of the way this week. Yesterday, my senior design group (or "DAWS Engineering" as we call ourselves- long story) finished and turned in our final report... all 102 glorious pages of it! It felt great to turn it in, since that one document represents an INSANE amount of work over the past several months. Our project was to design and analyze multiple processes to produce a certain chemical- so basically, we designed several entire chemical plants. We did all manner of calculations to figure out how much it would cost to produce the chemical using each of the different processes, studied the safety and environmental aspects of each process, etc. etc. etc. At any rate, we're just about done with senior design! All we have left is a presentation next week to a few professional engineers who are flying in to evaluate us.

The other big accomplishment of the week was the Fundamentals of Engineering exam (which is one of the steps required in order to be a licensed engineer- it covers everything a person is supposed to learn in engineering school, including quite a lot of stuff I didn't learn!). I took it today. The entire thing took 11 hours! The actual exam time was only 8 hrs, but we had a lunch break and about two hours of administrivia and other nonsense (waiting in line to be searched/admitted, listening to all the rules, filling out paperwork, etc). It feels great to be done with it, but now I'm worried about whether I passed. I won't find that out until the end of July.

One of the not-so-stressful events of the week was the Honors Scholars Symposium, which - for lack of a better term - honored the graduating "University Honors Scholars" (all the geeks like me). After completing their freshman and sophomore level honors classes, the members of the Honors College have the option of writing a senior thesis based on research. I did the math the other day, and only about 1% of Auburn grads do this... and (overachiever that I am) I'm one of them :-) I've absolutely loved doing research, though, and I'm enjoying writing my thesis (if only I could finish it!). So it hasn't really been that bad!

Here are a couple pictures from the symposium. It would be nice to put one up of me giving my presentation, but it didn't turn out so great and vanity prevents me from posting it :-p

A couple of my engineering buddies...

The director of the Honors College congratulating me after he presented my stole and goblet

My research advisor, Mario. And of course, the goblet. (It's a long story, but the goblet was partially what enticed me to go for the thesis option. As soon as I'm done with my thesis, the goblet is going to be tested with a little champagne :-p )

Well, that's been my week... the high points, anyway. If I can only hold on a few more days......

(And in case anyone's wondering, no, absolutely no knitting has occurred within the past couple weeks. I did take a break last night to do some minor alterations to my bridesmaid dress for an upcoming wedding - doing crafty things is always stress relieving - but no knitting; sorry!)

Take care!

Jennifer