Last Class

Today was our last day of class and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. It was a shame that I had to leave at 5:30 because all the presentations were great, people have more creativity than I ever thought they did. Out of all the presentations Nick's one really got me and I agree with him in a lot of the feelings about this class. For sure this class was one of my favorites this semester, I just felt that we were hanging out, just everyone talking and watching videos. It actually took me a while to realize how much I was learning because of all the fun we were having, it is difficult being an engineer to understand that you can learn without having to solve multiple math problems.
I also agree with Nick in about how shy I am and how open I felt that I was in this class. Normally I only talk on classes were participation is a huge percentage of your grade. Here whenever I felt like talking I was not shy about raising my hand, and even though I tried my best not to do presentations, when I did the ones for inspiration I just felt that I was talking to a group of friends. It is really hard to feel that way for me, but somehow it happened to me in this class for the first time ever in PSU.
And yeah it was really time consuming, and really frustrating to know that even though you are working so hard for this class you might not get an A just because another group got lucky and got more hits than you did, or did more money, or had a better idea. It is sad but I guess it is life. We just need to realize that the grade stays in PSU while the knowledge stays with us for life.

SHPE End of the Year Banquet

I couldn't go to class on Thursday because I had the End of the Year Banquet for my club and I was the one in charged of doing the event. The event turned out to be really nice after all the struggled that it was to plan it. Two weeks ago I had it all planned out: the food, the room, the invitations etc, everything seemed to be working out until I realized that my RSVP list was already at 60, and we had a room reserved for 60, and there was still 2 more weeks before the event. It was hard to change rooms, figure out a way to fit everyone there (we ended up with a list of 80 people), but we did it.
The event was really nice and simple, the president began talking about our major events of the years, then we followed up with a video with pictures, and ended up presenting the awards. We awarded all of our sponsors, our member of the year and our executive member of the year. We also awarded other 3 outstanding SHPE-members, these were defined by a point system that we have that gives points to each member according to how active they are in the club.
The ceremony concluded with a speech of the president for next year.

Week off before Final's week

I think it is hard enough to do 4-5 final exams in a week, and on top of that there are so many projects due on the week before finals, making it impossible for us to start studying early for finals. I strongly believe that we should get a week off right before finals. This will help everyone study and get ready for the week that is coming ahead. I know that there is supposed to be a rule here at PSU, I believe it is that the maximum of a final grade that can be defined in the last two weeks of class is 30% and I know from personal experience that a bunch of professors make huge projects due the week before finals even though they also have finals on finals week. Sometimes summing up to more than 30% of the final grade for the class being defined in the last 2 weeks of class. Even though some have a final that is 20% and a project that is 10%, which will make it fine according to the rule, the problem is not the percentage but the time and effort that both of them need in order to score a good grade. I just hoped that I didn't had two weeks as crazy as the ones coming up. And a great solution could be a break right before finals.

blackberry smartphone

The blackberry smartphone is impossible to live without once you’ve experienced owning one. I just got mine this semester, after debating whether to get the Blackbery or the Iphone, and don’t regret my decision at all. My favorite accessory on the phone is the Pandora application and the Blackberry Messenger. Pandora is great because I can listen to various types of music anytime, anywhere. Blackberry Messenger is absolutely free and let’s you chat with anyone who has the same application. It is wonderful because I can keep in touch with my family and friends back home at all times for no cost at all.

IE department centenial

This weekend the Pennsylvania State University's Industrial Engineering department is celebrating their 100th anniversary. The Harold and Inge Marcus Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering is the first Industrial Engineering department on the world, founded in 1909. Right now ranked on 4th nationally in undergrad and 5th nationally on graduate, Penn State IE has a lot more to celebrate than just the 100 years of its foundation; all of what they have achieved in this 100 years is amazing, where more than 7,000 industrial engineers have received degrees.
To commemorate this 100 years of excellence we are having different events through the weekend including, tours of the Leonhard building, picnics, competitions and a semi-formal banquet on Saturday night. A bunch of alumni will be attending these events, so will the faculty/staff of the department and some of the current students.

Happy Bday PSU IE department!

Exrteme Engineering

So if you read my previous post, hopefully you know what HSLC is and that it was this weekend. Well as mentioned on my previous post Extreme Engineering is our main event of the conference. It was a complete success and I think that high school students as well as us enjoyed it very much. The task this year was to create a boat that would be able to carry at least 1500 bbs and to be able to transport this "treasure" for a given distance. The teams well also tested on velocity, presentation, price, and innovation.
So this challenge started on Friday where we (the extreme engineers leaders) picked our teams after interviewing each student for a 1 min period. That night they picked their positions in the teams (President, VP, CEO, or whatever position they came up with) as well as their team's name, boat's name and their first sketch of this boat. On Saturday night they started building taking in consideration the dimensions requirements and the budget limitations. Every material had a price and the cheapest your boat was the most points you would get in that category. They only had a couple of hours to build it and the results were amazing considering the age of these students.
At the end every team was awarded with first place each on different categories. The real winners were the leaders of each groups. Us (the extreme engineering leaders) got together with the judges and told them who was the high school student that showed the strongest leadership characteristics and we award these students with digital cameras.

HSLC

My club SHPE (Socierty of Hispanic Engineers) is hosting next weekend our yearly High School Leadership Conference sponsored by Xerox. In this conference we bring around 40 high school students, usually juniors and seniors, to introduce them to PSU and to engineering. We aimed for Latino students that are interested in engineering, but we don't reject anyone so however is interested in coming can come. Normally it is really hard to get Latin students to come because of the perception that their parents have of college students, and being a Latino myself I know how our parents can be with trusting their kids to others. We do two trips to their high school to try to introduce the conference, ourselves and to show the parents that we are trustful and that their kids would be safe with us for the weekend, but is still not that easy to convince all of them.
On the conference we have one main project, which changes every year, but its basically an engineering project that would last for the entire weekend. Students get divided into groups of 6 students and get to win really good prices. Aside from this project they go to several campus tours including the Beaver Stadium Tour, the FAME lab tour, and the Nuclear Reactor tour. These students stay with different members from our club, but only with the ones that live on campus, since they have to be on campus due to PSU policies. We are getting ready to welcome the students for this year, which should be here on March 27th.

Fall Break

So now that we are on Spring Break I think it is a great time to bring up with this topic. My friends that go to different schools in the US and most of them have a Fall break. Before I thought that it was fine that we don't have one just because we have the thanksgiving week off. But now the more I think about it, the more I realize that it would be so much nicer to have a fall break that that week off, because of the timing.
As we can see Spring Break's timing is perfect; right after midterms when everyone is tired of studying and ready for a break. On the other hand Thanksgiving is a month before Winter break, personally at that time, I just want the semester to be over. And when you come back is like you need to hurry to turn all the final papers/projects.
I think it will be better if we had a fall break right after fall semester midterms and just one or two days off for thanksgiving as every other school!

Reality Shows

Even though the only reality show that I watch is Big Brother, I could say that I am a reality shows fan because you can find me every now and then watching a random episode of any other reality show. But why do we like them so much? How come in 5 year we have so many new reality shows out of nowhere? First I thought that it was easier to relate to them, but it is not completely true since we can relate to regular shows as well. I think it has more to do with the competitions, but are they THAT good?
I remember when I first saw the Bachelor it was fun but nothing amazing, in my opinion. But if you turn on the TV now there are at least 5 different shows with the same idea, Tila Tequila, Double Shot of Love, Rock of Love, and the Bachelorette. They are all the same, some with bisexual characters, some with rock stars but at the end there are all about paring a couple together. I think it is more of a mental thing, since we KNOW it is a reality show, we get more attach to it. Compared to a regular show where you know all the actors, you know their real lives, and even though we love the characters, we know that some day that show is going to end and all the actors will go back to their regular lives.

THON

I was a dancer this weekend for THON; it was a great experience but I need to say the truth, it wasn't fun all the time. Staying awake wasn't the problem for me, but I think that it was because I was in so much pain that I totally forgot that I hadn't slept for a really long time.
One of the things that were really frustrating for me was the fact that my morale (the person that is there specially for you, to support you, give you company, and just make sure that you were doing OK) had to leave, now I understand that if you have 700 dancers you cannot have 700 morales there at all time, but at the moment I just got really mad because we all had so much fun when they were there, and once they left we would just be there tired and complaining about every part of our body that was hurting, it was kind of depressing.
I got really scared on Sunday morning around 5 am, because my knees were killing me and I knew that I had around 12 more hours to go, and I was positive that there was no way I was going to make it 12 more hours in such a pain. I don't really understand how I did it, for a while I was just on a weird stage, I actually started to hear everyone speaking in Spanish when of course they were speaking in English, and a lot of weird stuff began to happen.
At the end thank God I did it and once you reach the last 4 hours and your THON family is there with you and you see who you are doing this for and what these hours of pains are actually for, then everything changes and you feel so much better. Well the pain is still there but at least you know it is for something that is completely worth it.

Rube Goldberg Competition

Penn State is having their annual Rube Goldberg competition this upcoming Saturday at 2pm in the Alumni Hall, you are all welcome to go and I strongly recommend you to do so. It is a really interesting competition, every team needs to build a Rube machine that can do an specific task, this year's task is to replace an incandescent light bulb with a more energy-efficient light-emitting device. I know it sounds complicated, I thought so myself when I first heard about it, but it is really simple it can be just changing a regular light bulb with a more energy-efficient one, one that uses less energy to operate. My team is the SHPE (Society of Hispanic Engineers) and we have been working on our machine since last semester. We have won 2nd place on the last 2 competitions, and we are trying to get 1st place this time.

For those of you who have no idea what a Rube Goldberg machine is, wellthey are those machines where a ball comes and hits a spoon an the spoon lets go another ball which hits a set of dominoes and they al fall etc etc... I hope you understand what I mean, it is just a complicated machine that performs a simple task.

For more information about the competition visit:

http://www.engr.psu.edu/RubeGoldberg/

The Grammys

Last night I saw the 51st annual Grammy's Award and I am still wondering if I liked them or not. It had a couple of nice performances but also some weird ones. Maybe I don't know all the artists and that's why I thought they were weird/boring. What I did found interesting was the fact that several artists preformed twice, they were good artists but why would you make them perform twice? I think there are enough good artists this year for the Grammys to make Justin Timberlake, Stevie Wonder and Kanye West preform twice on a 3 hour show. I really liked them and enjoyed both of their performances, but do you think that maybe some artists decline the invitation to preform at the Grammys? Or is it just that Justin, Stevie and Kanye are so good that they had to preform twice? It is just a thought and I hope everyone had the chance to watch them last night.

Terribel Towels

We were selling Terribel Towels this week and it went great, we were able to sell all of them... I wasnt really cheering for any team, but because of this project I became a Pitt's fan, at least for the game. I hope everyone enjoyed the game, it was a great game, and I am sorry for all the cardinal's fans, there is always next year...

GO PITT!!

My first week...

I wasn't in class the first week, so this week was the first one for me. I really liked the class, even though I am finding it really hard to learn everyone's name. The project we did on Thursday was a great example for what we are going to be doing for the next 2 weeks. Even though it is going to be a lot of work, I am really looking forward to it. Well I hope everyone is ready to start their businesses... GOOD LUCK!!