Bam! Marks from the last semester finished trickling in sometime in the past few days. Upon my last inquiry I had finally received the last grade for the last of my courses to be completed. That means I’m actually done. Bam! a few more illuminated pixels on the computer monitor and it’s now over.

Plenty of people have been asking me how it feels to be done and really it’s even more anti-climactic that you might first guess. No-one expects you to say “finishing my degree changed my life” but I’d guess that the question is supposed to have an answer there seems to be an expectation that finishing school is a turning point in life, really it wasn’t at all. Getting the Iron ring and making a pledge to pursue a career with professionalism did give a little dose of perspective change.

Why not? I don’t think it’s because I’m returning to Grad School. While that in some sense does make a difference regarding whether or not I see the end of a BSc as the actual end of school I think it’s mostly due to another reason. It’s because I’ve worked hard at putting school way down the totem pole of important things in life. Obviously I haven’t removed it from that hierarchy, because I did still bust my ass hard enough to keep the grades essentially flawless. I have however done a better job recently, especially the last 16 months or so, of putting many more important things first. School doesn’t even make the top 5 anymore: That is success.

The soundtrack of the day as I studied is below:

It’s coming up on my sixth run through…. and at 70 minutes in length obviously it’s been a long day, but there are only 3 more days and I’ll have this degree in the bag!

Quotes from ENGG 401 Finance for Engineering, Winter Semester 2008

• Nowadays we store money on electrons, we don’t even need to waste paper.
• The answer to question one is “c”
• Sometimes I invest in things that won’t make money, my wife disapproves of this because she could buy shoes.
• The world is set up so that no-one makes much money.
• I don’t want to deal with cheaters and liars, could all of the cheaters and lairs swap their registration to the other section of this course.
• When I make a graph I always put it in color because then I can say things like “Look at this color graph” that makes people believe our calculations to six decimal places.
• The answer to one of the questions on the midterm is “groupthink”
• The answer to one of the questions on the midterm is “Democratization of Knowledge”
• I can’t let you guys use a laptop with excel during the midterm exam because I realized this would make it possible for me to catch the cheaters and liars in this class and I already told you that I don’t want to deal with cheaters and liars.
• I already told you, below the line means that it needs to be below the line.
• I was talking to someone one who was complaining about not being able to gain weight. I asked her if she had even thought of going to Kentucky Fried Chicken and buying a bucket of chicken and then just eating the skins. Well then her response was “Don that’s gross” so I told her she must not really care about gaining weight if she’s not willing to do the things it takes to gain weight. The exact same thing happens if you want to get rich, you have to sometimes eat lots of chicken skins, Warren Buffet is rich because he knows that.

Quotes from PHYS 481 Electrodynamics number four, Fall Semester 2007

• This is where mathematics can take control of you if you don’t pay attention to what’s going on.
• That is the general case which includes both plucked and hammered types.
• I am not discovering a powder, you have all seen this before.
• This is really easy, you just add it and then bend your mind.
• kx – wt is my favorite way.
• That’s kind of tricky when there is a war going on.
• Sorry, I’m feeling slightly disorganized today.
• The assignment that was due yesterday is now going to be due on Friday at 4:00pm

Quotes from PHYS 472 Quantum Mechanics II, Fall Semester 2007

• Watch out: log-log scales always tend to fool you.
• You are all eligible to make a mistake with a delta function, I have been making mistakes my whole life.
• I can’t prove Bloch’s theorem so I will tell you a story instead.
• Those guys cannot appreciate physics, therefore we’re better than them.
• It’s just an integral! well I guess it’s two integrals, in three dimensions, so I guess really it’s just six integrals, but it’s still just an integral.
• If there were no h-bar we’d just have classical mechanics
• Sines and Cosines have a greater impact on your life than Airy functions.
• The reason you’ve not heard of Airy functions is just because they’re not a button on your calculator
• I’m treating this isotropically so the mass is the same in all directions.
• All the even ones are odd
• This notation is a disaster, don’t try this at home
• So, if anyone ever asks you how to make a hermite polynomial out of sine functions remember you only need about 25 of them.
• The Zeno paradox is actually kinda cute.
• My comments last class about keeping the final exam to two hours are probably a bit false.
• Could someone please look up the word cumulative in the dictionary for him
• Bonus points for Devon
  
  < Ross’s response > Dammit
  
  Bonus points are worth zero
  
  < Ross’s re-response > Yeah! Integrate that!

Quotes from EEBE 540 Digital Image Processing, Winter Semester 2008

• Man I’m brain dead today < pause > let me show you a picture
• Can I tell you that that is true? < pause > never trust a prof!
• Some people can whip it out fairly quickly
  
  < Followed almost inevitably by the distasteful comment from the back row >
  What? their Weiner Functions?

Quotes from EE 456 Introduction to Nanoelectronics, Winter Semester 2008

• Who can tell me what we’re going to get when we take this integral?
  
  <My response:> -13.6 eV!
  
  <pause> … right
• It’s not that Physicists don’t do useful things. They just do different things.
• There is no reality behind phenomenon, merely more phenomenon
• I’m not prepared to make any statements today, geometrically I’m a bit slow.
• To implement periodic boundary conditions, boundary conditions, to implement periodic boundary conditions, the system is modified, system is modified, modified, the system is modified by adding a term of -t_o, of -t_o, -t_o to the corners, corners where they otherwise would have been zero, the corner elements would have been zero but we modified them by adding a term of -t_o. This modification makes the matrix invertible, the matrix becomes invertible and that makes the system solvable or the equations linearly independent, the system becomes solvable because the equations are now linearly independent.
• Just trust me and you’ll be alright.
• If you do what I say you’ll be fine
• Don’t freak out on me; I’m not trying to psyche you out.

Dad called on the phone last Sunday, realizing he probably should back out of a half marathon he’s registered for at the end of the month in Calgary. That means there is an open spot to run in the race. I’m currently assessing whether or not I can actually do that without embarrassing myself. It looks like, based on today’s run, that I should be in OK shape and will probably give it a try. Managed quite easily 7min50sec miles for an hour. I’d like to try ten miles tomorrow and then make the final call on whether or not I’ll try for the full 21.1km in two weeks.

Finding time to get on the bike outside has been rough. I was forced to skip out on the Triathlon club’s first ride of the year… boohoo. I decided to write the accreditation exam to practice engineering in the United States (at some point in my career way down the road). That meant 10 hours were holed up in an exam room on day. That meant the next day when everyone else was out enjoying the beautiful weather I needed to put together a presentation about my research project for the semester. So as the rays beat down and some people managed their first sunburn of the year on their pasty thighs, I was only absorbing the radiation coming out of the LCDisplay in front of my face.

Cross Country racing starts this Wednesday evening, that’s always a highlight of my September and October so I’m going to give it a try this week. It’s short so I can probably manage OK but I’m sure Pat will once again destroy me. That does mean however that it will probably be a few more days yet until I get outside on that bike.

The Iron Ring ceremony for graduating engineers to be obligated into the profession was held this past weekend on March 29. The day started out with an ethics workshop put on by APEGGA in the morning, a rather excellent lunch and somewhat entertaining speaker (more for method of deliver than content) and then the ceremony. The ceremony is meant to be closed to the public so I’m not going to divulge details here. Anyhow, we all left with smiles on our faces:

We then cruised around downtown and went for dinner at the creperie. Following that a few EngPhys dealt with a robbery while the others proceeded to meet most of the addicts on Jasper. I was almost certain that my library book was stolen from the car and would have to pay a fine but the cops got it back. The evening wore on with a lengthly poker game and philosophical debate regarding whether or not it’s a valid system that we have created where the most effective means to getting good grades in your education are not the most conducive to learning material well.

We all decided that our education system has created test writing machines out of us, that we’re all very well adapted by this stage in our careers to demonstrating rapidly and with loose accuracy significant amounts information under relatively high stress conditions. In addition to the skills that were developed, we noted a few lacking areas contasting them. The retention level of such a situation is deemed to be low. This was attributed in part to the reality of gaining a grade at the end of a course and not being required to retain the information. Additionally however the examination style that follows the period of learning is one that doesn’t demand intimacy with the source material so long as it can be retrieved swiftly and with accuracy. Coming from the African education system Ayo suggested that his experience was even more that way and that in reality there was never any thinking required in the course of his secondary education. While the room was full of people who have successfully managed (very successfully, and in a few cases the most successfully) to develop skills to operate within the current education system, we unanimously identified that it was a bit scary. Upon departure from an academic institution the fact that regurgitation was smiled upon is not likely to benefit us in the long run. The ability to take in information at reproduce it in various forms does not aim careers favorably towards innovation and generally positive contribution to society.

Is there a cooling off period following graduation that is required so that we as humans can return a bit more towards mainstream life? I think so, but I’m also aware of the fact that the best way to reform bits and pieces of one’s mind is to stretch it a bit far in one direction and then let it slide back a ways, inevitably it will be shaped a bit by being drawn in that direction. I think to my own experience identifying myself on the political spectrum. Being drawn heavily in one direction under a certain experience can lead me a bit far afield, but allowing time to season that experience and come back to a bit more of a mainstream position leaves me with a better understanding of things and where I actually do find myself. Hopefully having been stretched over the course of the previous four years into a significant amount of information processing as well as priority management will shape a more efficient and balanced mind.

So I squeezed my way through semester 7. My Quantum Mechanics final exam today came blasting right down the calendar and arrived all too soon. Any time I’ve had to write more than 2 exams back to back one of them often suffers. I think that’s mostly due to the fact that any time you select 3 of my courses at random from the past years your bound to get at least one stickler. I don’t think I really suffered this time though as a matter of preparation or skills with the course. The final was just too long! I probably could have made my way through all the questions in a full 12 hour day of work with some help from a good calculator and a textbook, but to do it in 3 hours with no discussion or help was a bit much.

Anyhow, Christmas vacation has arrived and I’m quite happy to get out of classes for two weeks and do everything other than work hard on school.