The first week of school is finished. I’ve been to all of my classes except one monday-only class and my physics lab. So far I really love all my classes. I have a particularly passionate group of professors. Every single one of them has emphasized lifetime learning, good study habits, the importance of outside learning and such. One professor went on a tangent about Grace Hopper, one of my personal heroes. Another professor gave us a homework question that Richard Feynman answered in Six Easy Pieces, and I’ve read everything by Feynman about ten times. It’s great to see that my outside reading is so relevant to my classes this semester.
I took a little bit of my downtime this weekend to play around with my last little kit. My soldering skills are still pretty terrible but they can only go up from here. I do have a question for any of the female engineers who might read this blog. What do you do to keep your hair out of your workstation? I used bobby pins on my fly-a-ways on my ponytail and STILL managed to singe a stray hair. I have done this every single time I’ve tried to solder so far. I’m going to set myself on fire at this rate.
I decided to put the workstation on the back burner for now. I’m using a scrap piece of wood as my work surface and taking over the dining room table temporarily. I bought a plastic toolbox to store my growing set of tools and stuff and so I can just tuck away my electronics stuff when I’m not using it. Packing up the stuff semi-regularly isn’t ideal but an entire workbench doesn’t seem like a perfect solution for the moment either. The dining room table was always my study place so my husband doesn’t miss it that much anyway. The picture above is my temporary workstation.
Time to go learn two’s complement & flip-flops.