I’ll cut to the chase here: 3B was horrible, but a lot of fun. I hated it, but it was awesome. It was painful, but it rocked. My conflicting feelings are a symptom of neuroscientific surgery I underwent during the term to maintain my ability to drink beer, borrow assignments, get my clone to write my exams, and other stressful activities.

1. ME380 – Nuts, dominoes, and lectures you really didn’t need to attended (Design Workshop)
This was a design course. Which was awesome because there were no midterm or a final exam to worry about. We also had a *girl* in our group (you know, one of those who belong to the “other” kind). We sipped coffee, hung out on Sundays for breakfast, and had random lunches in the plaza right outside our campus. Oh, and we also managed to make this guy (for the final project):

It cost four people about 140 non-sleeping hours to get that done over the span of six weeks. Oh, and lots of coffee too. This was one expensive project, I tell ya.

My grade: Power user
Course grade: 12 hex nuts and a domino

2. MTE322 – Motors, sliding doors, bullshit, and more bullshit (Electromechanical Something Something)

Having the word “electromechanical” in a course title doesn’t excite me anymore. Bullshit was delivered to us in the truckloads with absolutely no delays in scheduling. It was like over-caffeinated, newly hired Fed Ex employees working overtime for Nonsense Information Corp. (NIC (c) 2007-2007, patents pending). To be honest, I must’ve attended a handful of lectures, so I had no clue what happened in the others. All I remember is a really happy TA who wouldn’t say a word without a chuckle, a prof who looks like he was beamed straight out of the 80s, and that thinking about lunch when the prof rambles away about screws is actually a way to keep your brain from being bombed back to the stone age.

My grade: Bullshit
Course grade: zeta- and a 0.3 hp AC induction motor, connected to a rack and pinion setup that’ll never work

3. MTE360 – Try Controlling This Course (Controls Engineering)
Laplace, PI, PD, PID, Lead, Lag, Notch, and a little servo that did exciting stuff like move forward and backward when we spent hours manipulating algebriac laplace-fused expressions, and tinkering with MATLAB/Simulink.

This prof was so amazing, I didn’t understand a word he said in class! The labs were crazy, but I had no idea what I was doing! The homework was hard, and I really had no idea where to start! It all made sense a few days before the final exam. Some of it seems useful.

My grade: I passed?!? omfg!
Course grade: Bandwidth of 20kHz

4. PSYCH 323R – How to Fix People With Broken Brains (Psychopathology)
Well, not really fix, but more like diagnose, understand what they go through, why they dance and howl like sissies when they see an action figure, and other relevant stuff. We also learned that anorexia should never be regarded as sexy, there’s an explanation to the schizophrenic lifestyle, and that if you scratch your nose and the clock strikes noon, chances are it will be categorized as a psychopathological disorder.

My grade: Would’ve been more if I weren’t obsessed about a random girl
Course grade: A-

5. MSci 261 – “Present Worth Calculation for Dummies – Now, A Second Year Course for Engineers And Retards!” (Management Science)
The title summarizes everything we learned in this course. We also learned that profs can actually be really really boring and the ability to speak for over half an hour on ONE powerpoint slide is a skill most of us don’t have and won’t even bother learning. I also never understood the concept of “equivalent annual cost” – I mean, if it’s more beneficial for me to hang on to my existing heap of junk car where the door falls off everytime you make a right turn for six more years, considering I have all the money for a new one right now, why the hell wouldn’t I dial 1-888-SHREDDER and buy my new car right away?

Some other productive things I did in this class:

• Show off my music collection
• Check my email
• Check email again, in case I missed something in the previous refresh
• Check facebook
• “OMG! She’s cute, let’s go through her profile.”

My grade: Same as everyone else’s
Course grade: Present Worth = Future Worth = -1; causes brain degradation and tumours of the eye sockets.

6. ME351 – “*clears throat* So, I show you *clears throat* video now okay” (Fluids)
This was an introductory course in fluids where we learned a million formulas that only worked under certain conditions replicable in extremely realistic scenarios such as textbook examples and computer simulations. We now know what a venturi tube does, and that a lot of calculations depend on the infamous “Moody’s Chart” which was crafted back in the 60s (I think).

My grade: Six litres of compressed gas in your water bottle – turbulent flow conditions
Course grade: B+

That was the end of 3B. Final statistics have been summarized below, for convenience and redundancy:

• Overall grade: Just as bad as the ones before, except 3A because that was just messed
• Term grade: Impossible, unless you’re already in Engineering
• Girls haggled and facestalked: 4

Other observations:

• I can’t get into the Bomber on Wednesdays, the lineup is too long
• Lots of hotties in Applied Health Sciences
• Facebook rocks
• Lots of hotties in Laurier, but they throw up all the time and need a ride home
• I wouldn’t bother with any Engineering program unless it’s Mechatronics