Year-in-Review: Year 4
Year 4 is in the books, and it's been an interesting one. Mostly in a good way. Summer semester of 2021 was
still completely remote, which gave me the opportunity to do my classes from home and have a full show season with my horse Reno, which I chronicled in an honors experience, Road to the AECs. Unfortunately my other plans for honors experiences this year have all fallen through with the travel bans, since I had hoped to travel internationally at least once in the past year, but it doesn't feel right to complain about that with everything that is going on in the world. I've taken to telling myself there's always next year and I do think it's going to work out this time, so I'm crossing my fingers for spring semester 2023.
It's getting weird, thinking about how close we are to graduating now. Just 1 co-op and a couple classes stand
in the way of getting my diploma and heading out into the world, and I still don't have a firm grasp on what I want to do when I graduate. It's a little nerve-wracking to think about, but I'm trying to stay focused on enjoying my time on co-op and in classes for now.
I completed my second co-op rotation with Kinetic Vision in the fall, and while there was some frustration
associated with it, it was mostly a good experience. My main point of contention was that the co-ops were required to be in the office, which would have been great it the full-time employees were there too. But the majority of them were still working from home, so a lot of the time it was just the co-ops in the office, and it sometimes felt like I was there mainly to answer the new co-ops' questions instead of to increase productivity, especially considering I had already done a semester of work fully remote with the company. There was some times when the work was slow too, so I did think about finding a new co-op for this summer, but after talking with quite a few different people and working with the company to get some more flexibility, I did decide to go back for the summer. They offered me a full-time position for when I graduate as well, which was very flattering, but i'm not ready to take it yet, considering I still don't really know what I want post-graduation.
Spring of 2022 was my first semester back on campus for classes fully in person for a long time (seriously,
the last time I had an in-person class was spring 2020 when we were sent home so it had been almost 2 full years). It was great to see my friends and classmates in person again, many of whom I hadn't seen since we were sent home. I hadn't realized that I was missing that interaction until I had it again, and it made a difference in a tough semester of classes. Heat transfer, anyone? A 60-plus-page lab report every 2 weeks in mechatronics? At least we could all complain and suffer through together in person this time. We did make it through with each other's help and support, but I will say I wasn't too sad for such a tough semester of classes to be over. And (knock on wood) it looks like we're going to have an almost-normal senior year, so I'm looking forward to it.