The Classes I’m Taking This Semester by Kayode D. '27

hello this is a blog. right now. rrahhhhhhhhhh

i wrote this blog using the most dangerous writing app, where you are forced to write in five-minute chunks, and if you ever stop, EVERYTHING gets DELETED. :o But don’t worry, I’m cool and awesome and never stop writing ッexcept for when I don’t post. Whoops. [I’m also too tired to do all of the footnotes. If I get one [1] ONE comment asking me to, I will.]

These are the classes that I am taking, in order from least – to – most edible: 

🪀2.008: Design and Manufacturing II

I’m taking 2.008 this semester, [Design and Manufacturing II]. It’s pretty neat! The goal of the class is to make FIFTY YOYOS :shock emoji: . This class has been extensively blogged to the moon and back, but I’m looking forward to it.

Cool thing that happened: I’m trying to talk to more people this semester. I think last semester I pulled back a lot and sort of isolated myself from new people. This semester, I want to 

1. Meet more new people who I can learn from
2. Remember more names!! I’m pretty ok at names. I don’t know how, but I remember names by how their spelled, kind of like a half finished hangman game. Problem is, I have to guess how it’s spelled. So an example is this girl I met named Eleni [eh-Lay-knee], but I only remembered the details of:

– Her name is five letters long

– Her name is vowel – [l or n] – vowel – [l or n] – vowel 

– Her name is NOT Elena…but i had no idea what it was when I saw her, and called her Alani.

And from these clues I have to scooby-doo back together their name. I am pretty good at the number of letters, though. 

Anywho, I was talking to the students in the class that I don’t know, shaking hands and kissing babies, when I met a guy with a strong grip and a strong accent. I ask where he’s from. DUDE. HE”S FROM SOUTH AFRICA. 

Over IAP, I spent two weeks in South Africa on a mission trip to the Mamelodi Township near Pretoria. I WILL write a blog about this, but the gyste is that we tutored high schoolers and hung out with them and shared the Gospel with them. Super amazing experience I WILL BLOG THIS SOON TRUST. 

Flash back to present, there are FOUR international foreign exchange students at MIT from University of Pretoria in South Africa. I was just there, so I hung out and talked with them! Soopah cool, and perchance we will see them as recurring characters come this semester…

Anyways I’m excited to make some yo-yo’s. Yo-yo’s aren’t edible at all. 

🚑EC.720: D-Lab for Design

This semester I’m also taking D-Lab for Design. This is a course two workshop class where you build a solution to a problem in another country. Some examples from this year are like a seaweed dryer for the Dominican Republic, and a grain dryer for a farm in New England, or a Kelp dryer…for…New York. But also a cocoa bean dryer for Ghana!! [There were a lot of drying projects this year.] Some students will be working on an EV ambulance for rural areas of Ghana, or a solution for the waste of the Aguaje fruit in Peru. MY team will be working on a stretcher for a township in SOUTH AFRICA. 

WHAAAAT I was just there! That’s crazy. This has been a project for a few years and has had a few iterations, so we’re not starting from scrap. The project partners in SA want the next iteration to be mountable onto a bicycle to make travel easier, so that will be our focus. That being said, we will be building bicycles and those are not edible, so this class goes in the same tier as yoyo class.

This is a prototype model from the group last year. They went to South Africa in January to implement it and now we’re gonna continue the project!

🔥2.005: Thermal Fluids Engineering I [💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀]

This would [AND WILL] go into the next Taking the L blog, but I regret to inform you all that I failed Thermo last semester 😔. It was rough coming to terms with this, but I don’t think it was due to a lack of understanding, but a lack of application. I was doing too much last semester and was not giving this class enough time. I didn’t end up doing well in the class, but now I can do it all over again with a better understanding!! I know most of the material and yes I will have to do all of the homework again and got to the NINE AM LECTURES [💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀💀], but it will be doable and I will know a LOT about thermodynamics and energy transfer. Thermo blog? Could that even be interesting? [Answer: Decidedly yes. Thermo is pretty cool when you don’t procrastinate…who woulda guessed?]

In the venn diagram of Things relating to Thermo and things relating to Food, heating things up is in the overlapping sliver, so it is somewhat edible.

this is deep seated kayode lore

📚CMS.306: Making Comics and Sequential Art

So when I got my schedule for this semester, I noticed something

This is Hydrant, a student-made website you can use to build a class schedule! If you notice, I have a HUGE hole in the right half of my schedule…

Almost all of my classes and activities are HEAVY on Mon/Tues/Wed, but then things get weird of Thurs. I have one class at Nine AM [Thermo], and then the next class isn’t until SEVEN PM. I have an eight hour gap in my schedule on Thursdays, and then only one [1] ONE recitation on Fridays. What a schedule to have. 

So what is this mysterious Thursday night class? I waited until now to post this blog so I could write about CMS.306: Making Comics and Sequential art. Review: it’s awesome but a very long lecture. We’re gonna be reading a lot of really cool comics and analyzing how they use the medium of sequential art to tell a story. 

The professor was talking about the class and topics and how we would analyze comics, and started to say something that felt really important, not just to the class but to life in general. I opened up a google doc and typed this about the gutter, which is the space between panels of a comic: 

“A semester about the gutter.” 

“The gutter, as Scott McCloud explains in The Invisible Art of Comics, is as much about what we don’t include as what we do include. You all are making a four panel comic. That’s not a lot of space. Presumably your story has parts cut out of it. You’ve made decisions about what to include and what not to include. That’s one thing that’s important.

Another is that time passes in the gutter.”

– Professor Wiser, on Thursday.

This will definitely be a blog later on, but i wanted to mention it now. Anways, here’s the doodles I drew: 

To open class, we had to draw any three things, but they must be wearing a hat. I chode a big thing with a tiny hat, a tiny thing with a big hat, and a hydra judging itself for the hat it wore. And a stick doodle based off of something that he had said in lecture. He encourages us to doodle in class!! Imagine that.

Then we had to make a four panel comic showing one of the characters defending their hat. I interpreted that as physically defend themselves, so the puffer fish ran away from a bunch of monsters. I wish I had scaled and placed the panels differently but I'm proud of the gradient idea i had with the GUTTERS. [see how it comes full circle?]

This was to use the ideas of angle the professor taught us. We had to turn a boring panel where a man opens a door into a three panel sequence that shows more of ANYTHING. In the end we did like 4.5 panels, but it's literally comics. I had that gutter quote thing in my mind, and how he said that the gutter shows that some time has passed. So I considered this to be like the end of a chapter, where the door opens and the page flip is that suspenseful first interaction of the nervous protagonist and whoever is in the room.

Then we made comics about firsthand stories of our classmates. This is a comic of the girl sitting next to me learning to drive for the first time, and being too afraid to use the gas or turn on the car.

This is my chicken scratch story. It's about thefirst time I watched my dad play the djembe as a kid and how it made me want to learn the drums.

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Comics are made of paper, and paper is edible. 

♟️ Board Game Design UROP 

Since I have sooo much free time in the latter half of the week, how am I spending that time? Another class? WRONG. I’m working on my UROP [Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program] of course! This semester, I am again working in the MIT Media Lab in the Center for Constructive Communication where I work on developing a card game that I am making for orientation. This will be it’s own blog, but what’s super amazing about my schedule is that I have TWO WHOLE FREE DAYS to work on the UROP and do my homework! Win! 

[Pictures will come in next blog…i hope😧]

Boards Games have tiny parts, and those are extremely edible. They’re an especially popular delicacy in the 0-3 age range. 

Overall, I don’t think my schedule would taste very good. Let me know, does your schedule taste very good?

cool songs i’ve been listening to a lot: firebird, itsumo, this song is so funny. i can’t stop dancing.