July 2 - July 6 Recap

July 2

Studying

Most of today was spent looking over the materials for the arc flash project, these included a type K thermocouple, a signal conditioning module, and a data logger. For the interested, some more information on the thermocouple can be found here, information on the signal conditioning module here, and data logger information here.

July 3

Studying, Meeting

Similar to Monday, today we spent more time in the morning reviewing the components mentioned in the above paragraph. In the afternoon, we met with the grad student to talk about the project some more. In the meeting, we discussed what each part does, as well as what its role in the project is. He gathered the materials needed for the project together so we could look over them a bit before using them.

July 4

Independence Day

Instead of going to the lab today to do more studying, we observed Independence Day and stayed at home and watched Will Smith beat up aliens.

July 5

Studying

Today we were supposed to start on the data recording part of the project, but the grad student was busy. Instead, we continued reviewing the information from earlier in the week. Not much else to report.

July 6

Graduate Studies Workshop

There was a workshop today in which we listened to a few lectures on the benefits of graduate school. We also had a round table discussion with some current grad students, and another "discussion" with the leaders of some of the engineering clubs. The second discussion is in quotes because there wasn't much discussing happening. At the end, a lady from the Society of Women Engineers came over to talk to me. "We let men join too." Not convincing.

In the afternoon, we had some more lectures regarding publishing papers in journals, going to conferences, and things like that. In all honesty, the only thing interesting was the discussion with current grad students about what grad school was like. It was supposed to last about 45 minutes, but went on for over an hour before being inorganically halted by the organizers for some other presentation.

Finally, we ran into our grad student to discuss a course of action for Monday, it seems like we're going to start setting up the experiment part of the project. About time.