Hello again future Miners! I hope you all had a good Halloween, I know I did. Here at Mines we had a dance in the form the Boo-Booze Bash to both celebrate the holiday and to spread alcohol awareness, as it was alcohol awareness week. It was a great dance and there was also a raffle which I won a water bottle at! The dance was a part of alcohol awareness week which was full of fun events to raise awareness of the dangers of binge drinking. Because of work, I was only able to attend the dance and the trivia night earlier in the week. Here at Mines, it’s hard to be able to go to every event, or even half of every event both because of how many events there are and because of the work load here. In the time between this and my last blog entry I had three tests and a report for EPICS.

If you haven’t heard about EPICS yet, let me be your guide! It is a three credit hour (but we meet five hours a week) class in which you learn how to write reports like you would as an engineer out in the world as well as how to use SolidWorks, which is a program used to design parts and assemble them into completed products! You can also use it to see how the thing you make would move with a motor, with gravity, and do stress analysis of the thing being made of various materials. While the class feels like it is only eating away at your day with five page reports, thirty minute presentations, and the two hours that aren’t given to you; it is a very useful class that can be put on a resume because it builds teamwork skills, teaches you how to give presentations, write the various types of reports you would have to as a professional engineer, and you can even take an exam to get certified in SolidWorks which also looks fantastic on a resume!

 Earlier this month I also attended International Day which is where many of the international students and their families cook and set up cultural booths! I spent a good $25 on food there just because of how amazing it all is. While Sodexo (the company that makes our food) is great, it’s nice just to have a home cooked meal for once, especially for an out of state student like myself who can’t just drive an hour or so to get home.  It’s too expensive to even go home for Thanksgiving for me; I have to wait until our break in the winter to see my family again.

I would like to close out this blog entry by handing down a simple bit of advice: Keep organized. How I do it is with a whiteboard for events and homework for the next two weeks, a planner for only events, and a planner for only academic and administrative things. While that seems like a lot, it really helps. I didn’t plan to do this by the way; it just sort of happened since I bought an academic planner and then upon coming to Mines received the Brunton, which is a planner that comes with important dates and fun events already filled in for you. I then decided not to waste the planners and divide them into social and academic. It turned out to be a fantastic system that I will definitely be using for the rest of my time here.