finals week

senior design presentations were last night, and my team did great! travis kind of read the slides and leroy seemed nervous, but casey was awesome! i think he realized he stank it up last time and practiced hard. one of our classmates even commented during the question-and-answer portion that we'd come a very long way since our last presentation, and our professor told us we did great. woo!

the funny thing about the conference last night was that the entire building was freezing. where i was sitting seemed to be even colder than the rest of the room, so while i was waiting to present, i was actually thinking more about how it might be warm up on the stage than i was about what i was supposed to be talking about. unfortunately, the stage turned out to be only slightly warmer than where i was sitting. i was standing there trying to look professional, shivering. i wasn't nervous until it occured to me that i was shaking and probably looked terrified. great...

but we appearently did very well, so now if i can be hardcore and work on our paper all weekend, we should do fine in that class. hopefully...

so miller gave me an 89 on my controls test. that really bugs me. i should have gotten an A! sure, it was the third-highest grade in the class (behind casey, who somehow pulled a 99, and josh, who got a 90), and yeah, i beat jon (albeit by one point), but i really could have used an A and i really deserved an A. he took off lots of points for bogus stuff. i tried to talk to him about my test, and he didn't give me any points back. i'm mad. now, even though i have done well on both tests and have a nearly perfect homework grade, it's going to be really hard for me to pull an A in the class because of my crappy quiz grade. i'm horrible at quizzes.

machine design is going to be cake. if i don't get an A in this class, i will be seriously surprised. civil won't be quite as easy as machine design, but i think it'll be fine. claudia told me and josh that we're doing great in the class and have nothing to worry about. i already know i have As in both of my labs. yay!

the big mystery here is mechatronics. i got a D on the first test (which was above average), and miller said he curved that test. but when he displayed the class distribution the other day, it didn't look like he had. hmm.... i have As on everything else in that class, so i don't know.

one paper, a few meetings, and four finals from now, i will be done with the most difficult semester i've had so far. hopefully next semester the acedemics won't be so horrid.