Last time I documented my engineering journey here I was preparing to sit my first university exams.

Now, writing this I am halfway through my second semester finishing my mid-semester tests and receiving projects. This semester brings a new set of courses from the course I was looking forward to the most to papers with sets of skills I have never used before.
The chemical materials paper is my favourite as the content is interesting and has a lecturer who almost always brings her hammer and blowtorch to lectures to smash mugs to demonstrate the properties of ceramics, heat glass rods to show their properties when exposed to heat or use pliers to explode glass Prince Rupert Drops. I am also learning how to code in Matlab for engineering computation and use 3D modelling software called Creo for design. These are the basis for my two projects where I will be tinting and overlaying images taken from the Hubble telescope for coding and modelling a wood-working vice for design.

A new university experience for me this semester has been labs for chemical materials, coding and design. These allow us to have hands on experience such as cold rolling and hardness testing aluminium and coding a script which essentially scans an airport bag scanner photo for inorganic materials. This time of year is also when I have to begin thinking about how I can start accumulating my 800 hours work experience due to the competition between students for these jobs.