January 27, 2012

  • Adventures in Engineering

    "I place a .5 likelihood of being able to finish it within an hour." FAMOUS LAST WORDS. Not every engineering class gives equal amounts of homework, and if I'd so much as looked through it beforehand, I'd've known better.

    The first thing I noticed was that it was looonnnnngggg. The problem statements alone were five pages! And they were worded compactly: one problem was comprised of a list of six things to answer for each subproblem, and then a list of six subproblems. There was a great deal of graph-drawing, and then ---

    It told me to plot something using Simulink.

    What in Programming is Simulink?

    Accordingly, as a spoiled programmer who is used to the Zoo computers having everything, I headed to the Zoo and searched the applications folder, and I couldn't find it! Eventually, some Googling around teaches me that Simulink has to be run from Matlab. Another half hour goes by while I work out how to use this thing. I didn't know how to get reasonable plots from it either, so I exported the simulated data into Matlab and plotted it there instead.

    I did finish, but it was a big fiasco. It took about three times as long as I was expecting. I've seen how this class's problem sets behave, and I've learned my lesson. That won't be happening again.