Adam makes a guest appearance by Mollie B. '06

Mollie has decided that she doesn’t want to write any more “this is how my interview weekend went” entries. So seeing all she has to talk about these days are said weekends she’s asked me to write something about my terribly interesting life. This is my first ever blog entry…so bear with me.

Me working on one of my planes

There are a few constants in the universe, death, taxes, and MIT students complaining about how much work they have to do. I guarantee you that one day will not go by in your undergraduate careers without someone telling you about their 4 psets, 3 labs, and 2 papers that are all due tomorrow by 5pm. There’s just something therapeutic about complaining. So in keeping with MIT tradition I am now going to tell you about how much work I had to do last week, and you should cower in awe appropriately.

We’ll start with course work. So I usually have 2 psets a week, but this week I also had a presentation in one of my HASS classes. The first pset was for 16.901 “Computational Methods In Aerospace Engineering” but I think a more appropriate name would be “Lots of Taylor series and some MATLAB code that Adam does not understand.” I’d give this pset a 2 out of 5 on the “assume the fetal position” scale. Pset number two was for 16.05 “Thermal Energy” or more descriptively “How to Build Jet Engines.” While this class ranks much higher on the coolness scale (jet engines win over MATLAB any day), it is also proportionally higher on the “assume the fetal position” scale. But after 6 hours of analyzing Brayton cycles and figuring out the delta s of compressor stages, I’m one step closer to being a rocket…errr airplane scientist.

The high point of the week, surprisingly, was my 21W.785 presentation. The class is centered around a semester-long group project where we create a webpage. Now it’s not like we’re just setting up a myspace page and taking a nap for the rest of the semester. Each project is quite involved; our group, for example, is making a customizable virtual tour of MIT’s campus complete with video clips and 360-degree panoramas of select locations. This week we had to give a 20 minute presentation outlining out site and our plans for the semester. The presentation was supposed to include technical specs and mockups of our site. The problem with this was that no one in my group knew HTML, PHP, CSS, or any other form of web publishing short of writing something in Word and saving it as .html. So after 3 hours of trying to learn CSS I went to the Dreamweaver website. 3 hours after that I had a totally sweet looking homepage. Granted, none of the links worked, but there were pictures and a pretty rollover navigation menu. Long story short, our presentation went exceptionally well, and I learned that I’m actually pretty good at web design. (Editor’s note: Except that he doesn’t understand anything else about computers.)

In other news: “Adam Woodworth woke up at the crack of dawn this morning to go fly airplanes.” I have two jobs this semester. One is my internship at Draper Labs which has been ongoing since last June, and the other involves helping the 16.82x (Aero/Astro senior capstone) students finish and test fly their airplanes for the AIAA Design Build Fly competition. Both of these jobs involve lots of flying, and flight tests are best conducted on warm, calm, rain-free days. The problem is that it’s March in New England and most days dont meet the aforementioned criteria. Thus on the few flyable days we had this week both Draper and 16.82 wanted me to fly. Since I have not yet created the technology that allows me to be in two places at the same time, I had to wake up very early to go fly for Draper so that I could then go fly for 16.82 and then go to class. Luckily for me, I like flying more than I like sleep. (Editor’s note: That’s not what he’s singing when the alarm goes off at 7 AM…)

Well that was my week in all of its hardcoreness. I hope that you were impressed (I know Chuck Norris was). Provided that you didn’t hate the entry and found me at least mildly amusing, Mollie wants me to write another entry about my research work. So hopefully I’ll talk to you all later…