Sarah

Hey Hawkeyes!

Wow, it’s been a busy week. I’ll try to give a full recap to get caught up and then hopefully I can make smaller posts more frequently. I’ll start with last weekend (the UNI game).

Last weekend began with me spending the night at a friend’s apartment. It was exciting to get out of the dorms for a little bit, but I was still close enough that I could go to the game on Saturday. My friend and I went out to dinner before she drove me to Hy-vee to re-stock on food. My study snacks had been slowly depleting with the amount of homework I’ve been doing lately. One of the highlights of staying at her apartment was taking a shower with hot water in an actual bathroom. At a certain point you just get tired of the dorm showers. Especially when you have to get up at 6:30 to have a hot shower. My friend dropped me off at my dorm in time to go to lunch with some other friends before heading to the game against Northern Iowa.

Sitting in Kinnick waiting for the game to start. The earlier you get there, the better seats you can find.

They told me that I needed to be in at least one picture 🙂

It was a nice day for the game, a little warm, but not bad. I’ve been trying to work on my sports photography so I’ll share a few that I thought were decent.

Kick-off at some point. I don’t know much about football, which means I know basically nothing. I just like taking pictures 🙂

Pushing through for more yards

Celebration after a touchdown! A very happy moment for players and fans. (The blurry black part on the right side is a happy fan’s arm that flew up at the last minute.)

The rest of the weekend was spent doing homework and getting ready for the coming week.I had plenty of homework and a few big assignments. Word of advice? Start Engineering Problem Solving 1 homework earlier. The first few problems are really easy so you put it off, and then you end up staying up until 3am to finish the homework the morning that it’s due. It did get finished (I still don’t know my grade yet) but I felt pretty good about it. Other than being really tired, Tuesday went pretty well. Then I decided to start my Engineering Problem Solving 2 homework that was due Friday. We had to write a password validity program that had multiple requirements. After sitting in the T.A. Office Hours for 4 hours, I had the entire code written and was getting ready to run the program when I accidentally over-wrote the file. Essentially, I deleted my entire program with no way to retrieve it. I did feel bad for the poor T.A. who had to deal with a pretty distraught me. I managed to re-type a quarter of my program Tuesday night. After sitting in office hours all Wednesday night and Thursday night, I finally finished my code and submitted it. Now I just have to wait for my grade. Lesson learned: back-up everything and be very careful before clicking anything that might alter your work.

Wednesday was a relaxing day(other than worrying about my program). I decided to take a photography class first year seminar so I could get away from the math and science of engineering.  So far it’s been one of my best decisions yet. The professor is awesome and the atmosphere of the class is very relaxed. We took a “field trip” on Wednesday during our class time. Our “field trip” meant meeting at the Old Capitol and taking pictures of the stair case:

The stair case in the Old Capitol. Our assignment was to get a unique picture from a different angle.

We also had to take a picture of the architecture of the Old Capitol.

I tried to go for a “up the stairs to the pillars” shot. I’m not sure how I feel about how this turned out.

The highlight of the day? Our professor brought her kids (her poodles) to class and we were assigned to take at least one picture of them.

Bailey, the shy and slightly timid one, but she still loved attention.

This is Rex(T-Rex). He was very friendly and greeted everyone that walked past the Old Capitol steps.

For a class of ten girls that all miss their pets, seeing the dogs was a great way to relax. We could pick up the dogs and move them around.

Bailey posing for a picture.

I’m sure all the people walking past thought we were crazy. Quite a few people stopped and took their own pictures and cuddled the dogs too. We just don’t see animals as much as we’d like.

Friday meant almost all my homework was due. I had a couple papers, my resume, and my EPS2 homework due. I also had Engineering Problem Solving 1 discussion. This just so happened to be our lab day. On Monday we had chosen what type of cookie and what type of chocolate we wanted. We had to have consistent chocolate coating with the majority of the cookie covered. We had to measure the cookies so we can determine if we’ve been successful in coating the cookie.

Weighing the cookies and recording mass. We organized our cookies by letters to keep them straight.

My group decided to coat half our cookie with vanilla almond bark and the other half with chocolate. My group works well together, we just need to get faster at working within our time constraints. Our final product ended up being rushed and not as pretty as we’d hoped, but they still looked very tasty(we also got to sample a few of the extras 🙂 ).

Our finished product 🙂

On Monday we’ll measure the final product and record new dimensions. I think they look pretty good 🙂

Saturday was the football name against Central Michigan(which we lost 🙁 ) but it was still fun to go to the game. I went with a few friends and we were really close to the side line(bad place for pictures) so we felt really close to the action.

A small part of my group for the game

It’s really nice now that the weather has cooled off. I still got sunburned though (I even put sunblock on!). I made an attempt to work on my sports photography again.

One of the pictures I thought was pretty cool.

Getting ready to play

Sorry for the really long post. This next week will hopefully be less stressful (ha!) so I can do several small posts instead of a great big one like this. Hope you’ve enjoyed reading about my week of mistakes and learning moments. Thanks for sticking all the way through! 🙂

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 23rd, 2012 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Academics, Events, Photos, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.