The Study in Study Abroad

I haven't really posted anything about what I'm actually doing in terms of school yet, so I thought I would do that.

My hardest class, the one that's been consuming a ton of my free time, especially this past week, is Software Engineering. It's designed to give realistic experience working as part of a team on a large-scale software project, so the whole class is project based (we work in teams of 6, randomly assigned). The project this semester was to design a control system for a robot that would travel around a factory floor (simulated on smaller robots about the size of canteloupes [or 'rockmelons' as they're called here]). Our robot takes commands from a user who has the map represented on their computer screen. The user tells the robot where on the map to travel to and optionally which sections to avoid, and it goes there, following black lines on the floor to stay on track. In real life it's about as impressive as it sounds, but it took a ton of work and we're all sort of proud of it (in a I-will-crush-you-if-you-make-one-more-wrong-turn sort of way). Besides all the coding, we also have hundreds of pages of documentation to show for it as well.

My other Comp Sci class is Operating Systems. It hasn't been nearly as much work, but it's still been fairly interesting. Earlier in the semester I wrote code to simulate several different process scheduling algorithms, and right now I'm simulating page replacement algorithms and then writing a report on them. Don't worry, I don't expect most of you to understand that last sentence.

Moving away from the sciences, I'm taking Film Studies, which has been quite fun. My big project in there was a paper exploring the use of cinematic techniques in Fight Club's treatment of masculinity.

My fourth class, 20th Century Australian History, has also been pretty interesting. I know a lot more now about Australian history than I did before (not really that hard, since before I knew absolutely zilch). Earlier in the semester I wrote a paper about the eugenics movement in Australia between WWI and WWII, focusing especially on the influence of Australian modernist artists like Max Dupain (photographer of the famous Sunbaker).

Rather than writing more about homework, I'm going to get back to doing it now.