A New Semester Begins

My desk finally arrived yesterday. Previously, due to a phone number change, the delivery person couldn’t contact me, so it wasn’t delivered. After waiting for half a month, I couldn’t wait any longer, so I called Amazon using my broken English to explain the situation from start to finish. Then, I called the company Amazon outsourced to, and then the delivery company they assigned, and finally the delivery driver… and finally, it was delivered. Afterwards, I spent over 5 hours assembling it, with my sweat dripping onto every single screw. I kept tightening and tapping, and eventually, I managed to assemble this L-Shape desk. Now, it can hold my two laptops, a 24-inch monitor, and an external keyboard, with plenty of space left over for reading and doing homework. It’s perfect. I’m still missing a small fish tank, but that will have to wait until I have a car. Overall, my studio in the US is basically set up, and I can finally focus on programming and learning.

Coincidentally, on the second day after my studio was set up, the 10+ programming books I mailed from home arrived. Previously, I was preparing for battle, and now that the supplies have arrived, it’s time to start.

This semester, I’ve chosen 4 courses: 3 EE courses and 1 CS course. Among the EE courses, one is Analog Circuit, which is said to be very difficult. It was hard to get into this course, and I had to keep refreshing the course selection system for three days before I finally managed to enroll. The classroom for this course is in O’Brain Hall, which is originally the law school building. The red brick classroom is very impressive. The textbook for this course is expensive, costing $160, and with tax, I ended up paying $180… it’s really painful.

The other two EE courses are relatively easier. Since I’m new here, I don’t have a good sense of the courses’ difficulty levels, so it’s better not to take all difficult courses at once. I need to balance them out with some easier ones. One of the courses is RF and Microwave Circuit, which is taught by a Greek person. His English pronunciation is really hard to understand, and it’s frustrating to listen to, but apparently, the course isn’t difficult, and I’m interested in RF and microwave circuits, so I didn’t drop it. The most interesting course this semester is BioMEMS&Lab-On-a-Chip (LOC), which is taught by a Korean person. This course introduces micro-manufacturing processes and on-chip systems, combining biology knowledge. It’s an interdisciplinary field, and it seems that it will be a promising direction for the future, haha.

I’ve also chosen a CS course, Multimedia Network, which focuses on the basics, explaining concepts like QoS and H.264 video encoding in multimedia networks. This course doesn’t have exams, and I only need to do projects and presentations.

At first glance, the courses I’ve chosen seem unrelated, but actually, they’re all part of a plan to lay the groundwork for further learning and development in Wireless Sensor Network. Whether it’s the three EE courses or the CS course…

Everything is going according to plan.

P.S. I must keep up the good habit of reading, even though all the books are in English. I must persevere.