It's Good to be (a Girl) in Engineering

I had a really bad day today. Tuesdays are usually my worst day since I have 9-5 uni with an hour break for lunch. For some reason 9-5 uni is SO MUCH WORSE than 9-5 work, probably because you can't choose the pace you're going at, and only so much information can go into your brain before you start going insane.

I had a three hour Embedded Systems lab this morning which involved translating a C program into Assembly. I would usually find that sort of thing very fun, but when you've got three hours to debug an Assembly program, it's not so good. What makes it worse is what we were actually doing. The actual program we were writing was a key-guessing game, and was being loaded onto this little robot thingy (which pretty much consists of an LCD screen, 4 buttons and most importantly, a faulty power cable for our enjoyment). Now the program plays you 3 random notes, and then you have to press the corresponding buttons to repeat the tune (higher levels involve longer sequences, but we only had to implement level 3 in assembly). So imagine about 8 groups each with one of these bloody things all making stupid noises in a small, resonant lab at 9 in the morning, while trying to figure out why your stupid stack is screwing up. GRRR! At least we (finally) got it finished in time.

Next was an awful Communication Systems lecture. The material is very interesting but unfortunately for the class, the lecturer has a thick Chinese accent accompanied by an adorable lisp, or rather, would be adorable if we didn't actually REALLY need to understand what he was saying to pass the unit. By this time my cold and flu tablet started wearing off, but on the bright side at least my cough kept me awake during the lecture.

My one hour lunch break was spent going over the Communications assignment which is due on Thursday with Adam and Lara, so that was extra fun. Then the final stretch of the day involved an Embedded Systems tute, a Circuits and Electronic Systems lecture, and an Artificial Intelligence lecture (nice light entertainment to finish the day off). I've actually really fallen behind in Circuits so those lectures could actually be in Spanish for all I know. In the AI lecture we started learning about lists in Prolog which must have taken a very unique form of insanity to invent. When the day was finally over, I was off through peak hour traffic, looking forward to relaxing at Matt's house and watching the final Prison Break, which turned out to be really annoying, (I wont say too much), but there'll now most definately be a 3rd season.

Annnyyywayyy, now to the point of all this complainin'. So I get home after an annoying day at uni, check on Morris the Mouse (c), and sit down for a nice cup of tea, and realise I have a letter from the uni. I open it up and it turns out that I am:

"the recipient of the Motorola Prize for 2006 to the value of $300. The prize is awarded by the Board of Examiners in Engineering, Computing, and Mathematics to the female student with the highest weighted average mark in the following units: Circuits and Electronic Systems 2, Electromagnetics and Electromechanics, Digital System Design, Signals and Systems 3 and four BCM major units".

Nice and specific. That letter couldn't have picked a better day to arrive on! It really made me happy, (not so much because of the money, but hey that helps!) because no matter how hard uni gets, how stressed out I feel, how far behind I fall, it reminded me that I'll always manage to catch up because that's just what you do when you're a student, and you love what you're doing. I guess the moral of the story is that when you're feeling lost, you should remember all the little signs that have proved you're on the right path, even when it feels like you can't remember the reason why you got there in the first place.