A New Semester Begins

My desk finally arrived yesterday, after a long wait. Previously, due to a change in my phone number, the delivery person couldn’t contact me, and it wasn’t delivered. After waiting for half a month, I couldn’t wait any longer, so I called Amazon, explained the situation in my broken English, and then called the company Amazon outsourced to, and then the delivery company they assigned, and finally the delivery person… and finally, it was delivered. After that, I spent over 5 hours assembling it, sweating over every screw, constantly tightening and tapping, until I finally assembled this L-Shape desk. Now, it can hold my two laptops, a 24-inch monitor, and an external keyboard, with enough space left over to read and do homework, perfect. I’m still missing a small fish tank, but that will have to wait until I have a car. Overall, my home 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 in EE and 1 in CS. One of the EE courses, Analog Circuit, is supposedly very difficult, and it was hard to get into, but I finally managed to enroll after trying for three days. The classroom for this course is in O’Brain Hall, which is originally the law school building, and the red brick classroom is very impressive. The textbook for this course is very expensive, $160 plus tax, which totals $180… it’s really painful.

The other two EE courses are relatively easier, but since I’m new here, I don’t have a good sense of the course load, so it’s better not to take all difficult courses. I need to balance them out with some easier ones. One of them is RF and Microwave Circuit, which is taught by a Greek person, and his English is really hard to listen to, but the course is supposedly not difficult, and I’m interested in RF and Microwave Circuit, 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, and it introduces micro-manufacturing processes and on-chip systems, combining biology knowledge. It’s an interdisciplinary field, and it seems that after graduation, I’ll be researching in this area. I have to say, after being introduced to these courses, I think this direction has a great 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, only projects and presentations.

It seems like the courses I’ve chosen are unrelated, but actually, they’re all laying the groundwork for my future study 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 if it’s all in English, I have to persist.