Semester-end course breakdown, Part 1
It’s been a while. Frankly I’ve just been being lazy. This semester isn’t particularily onerous, which goes a ways towards explaining why I haven’t been putting forth much effort. It’s far too easy to fall into complacency when I’m not so busy that I have no time. On the plus side, I’ve finally caught up on sleep! However, with the semester nearly over (a scary thought in itself, time has literally flown by), it’s interesting to look back on the courses I’ve been taking. We’re still doing general topics common to many engineering disciplines, soils, fluids, that kind of thing.
APSC201 - Technical Communications: I’ve gotta be honest and say that I have no particular love for, nor do I derive any enjoyment from, this course. The main purpose seems to be to teach us how to follow document formatting guidelines. Granted, I can conceive that this may be a useful skill, if a particular company requires documents to be prepared in a specific way. With that said, it’s hardly the kind of thing that I’m prepared to spend time memorizing - if there are presentation guidelines, I will print them off and read them as I prepare my documents, rather than wasting hours committing the guidelines to memory. The testing for the course unfortunately [for my grades and motivation] centres on our ability to memorize which elements are required in a piece of text - an exercise which I consider pointless and without merit.
The course also does nothing to directly address the problem that most engineers here at UBC have with writing English, that problem being that English is a second language. Obviously the course helps indirectly by requiring grammatically correct composition. However, for those who have difficulty with written English, this is insufficient to fix any bad habits because any grammatical mistakes are treated as isolated incidents. Furthermore, for those who are able to write well in English, the course offers few benefits besides teaching them how to read a list of requirements and ensure that all requirements are present - something anyone in engineering frankly should be able to do.
I will give the course credit for teaching people about tone in writing. This is a valuable skill, but I personally think that this course needs some work before it will be taken seriously by students.
In related news, there was talk of replacing the first-year English requirement for engineers with another technical writing course. Hopefully I managed to shoot that idea down through a friend on the Senate. At least with a technical writing course and a pure English course, there is variety, and further with an actual English professor there are many more resources at a student’s disposal to increase their basic understanding of the English language. We should always strive to broaden our educational experience rather than narrowing it.
CIVL210 - Soils: this is a fun and interesting class. The focus is on empirically-derived relationships between soil characteristics, such as permeability, specific gravity, void ratio, and engineering and site-specific parameters such as seepage flow and shear strength. The labs are not boring or poorly designed, as was the case with many of my first-year physics labs, and they serve to usefully illustrate properties and behaviours that the student may not have a very strong intuitive feel for (again, unlike my physics labs, which always illustrated concepts that everybody already understood). The course includes four labs: an Atterberg Limits test, a Proctor and modified Proctor compaction test, a Direct Shearbox test, and a Falling Head Permeability test. The findings and calculations tie in nicely to the coursework.
There is also no midterm, which is always a blessing. The final will probably be confusing, simply due to the sheer number of possible terms and relationships which we can be tested upon. However, thanks to the design of the course, building concepts upon one another until everything is tied together for slope stability analysis, this will hopefully not be too frustrating. After taking this course, I am definitely more interested in doing work on tailings dams and other such earth structures in mines.
I will discuss MECH280, MINE293, and MINE295 in a later entry.
In other news, running against the very tough opponent of nobody whatsoever, I squeaked out a victory as the Clothing and Merch Rep for our mining club for the second semester. After being closely involved with merchandise design during the Mining Games, I’m quite excited to have this chance to get creative in my spare time - not that I don’t anyways. We’ve got a great group of kids here this year, a large number of which are getting involved at all levels with the mining community at UBC. It’s going to be a good year - as soon as I find a job for September. Maybe I’m looking too early, but hey, I’d rather talk to people in person than by phone from Fort Mac!
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