Well I’ve been gone for just over 80 days now and I’m just getting my first real break in about… 80 days. I haven’t even had a real weekend in about two weeks! So if you can imagine, I don’t know what to do with all this free time! Mostly I’ve been sleeping until about 2-3pm and staying up just as late in the am.
But its really nice, I think the whole school needed a break, especially us engineering kids. We just finished a week long super intensive lab where in the span of 9 days, on top of our other classes, we were charged with creating a fully prototyped, commercially viable product which we had to present to an audience of our peers and faculty. It was really awesome and I learned a ton, but 2 weeks of super late nights is a little wearing! Our product was very successful and the whole lab was such a success that the school is hiring a patent lawyer to look over all the projects so that maybe we could patent some of them! Wouldn’t that be cool, to leave first semester of freshman year with a couple of patents under your belt!?!
The week before all this was filled with engineering as well because I was part of a team of 11 students who were working on modifying a pedal car to race in an event on the Corniche. It was a lot of work, and again a lot of late nights, because we didn’t get the actual car until 2 weeks before the race, and then we didn’t get any tools until a week before the race! (oh the fun of a brand new university!) But we pulled it together and we raced very successfully! We placed 4th out of over 20 entries! In our first year! Next year, we’re going to dominate. You can check out some pictures at the NYUAD website.
Well, other than that, school’s been going very well, despite the very high workload. We’re still trying to get some basic things like student government and music ensembles off the ground but its coming along. Many people are taking a chance this break to travel around the region (or Europe – its close enough!) so its quiet around the tower. It rained last week! Probably less than an inch but it was more than enough to get most of the school out of their beds at 11:30pm to come dance in the streets. You never really know how much you can miss simple precipitation… I can’t wait to see all the snow back in MN, so make sure it doesn’t all melt! Until next time!
