Category: MIT & Boston

Anything that happens in MIT and beyond.

The Triple Weekend Update, Part I: Game Over

chorl

That’s it.

As of yesterday, I technically have received the S.B. degree in Mechanical Engineering [as recommended by the Department™] from MIT.

It’s over!

There wasn’t a final boss battle, or ultimate mission aboard a pirated space freighter to recover The Degree, or arena deathmatch with all 190-odd students in Mechanical Engineering, or anything like that. It was more like Pokemon – a long and winding, nonlinear but directed adventure game of collecting all the requirements, training them, and then… nevermind, that didn’t work. Though a deathmatch would have been really hardcore and awesome.

I’m done.

How on earth did I pull that off? In recent history, I’ve been a total academic slacker, mostly to concentrate on building everything ever. I really let myself go this term, pretty much emerging with the bare minimum grades possible, and I’m sure there were several opportunities where I could have been DENIED. Kind of scary to think about.

Anyways… what do I mean when I say I technically got the degree?

I’ve never been a celebratory person, so instead of walking at Commencement, I chose instead to pick up my degree later. In lieu of participating in the ceremony, I hauled a bunch of my stuff over to the Mechanical Engineering open house tent and set up a display for the reception afterwards.  Every year, the MechE department (with our joyous kindergarten-esque banner) displays a bunch of projects from students, teams, research groups, and the like. So naturally, I took the opportunity to turn this into another demo event.

After all, my life isn’t complete without convincing someone every day that all we do here is build dumb shit, right?

The scene, before the Commencement ceremonies ended and everybody swarmed the tent for free food. Other mechanical contraptions in attendance include the FSAE race cars (shown), the solar car team, and a few international development projects.

And afterwards. Much merry was made, goodbyes were exchanged, and I definitely got an average amount of “what does THIS do?!” questions. Unfortunately, I didn’t really have conclusive answers for many of them, because not even I know what the hell my stuff does half the time. Usually it blows up or becomes Internet-famous.

And there you have it.

The Project Tally for the Past 4 Years a.k.a \m/IT \m/echanical \m/ayhem 2007 – 2011

chorl

In a moment of sleep-deprived impulsiveness, I examined all of my historic site posts under the various projects I’ve done, spanning all the way back to July 2007 when this version of the site came online.

I kept track of what months and days a certain project was active and being worked on. It was a short exercise that was both a welcoming break from the mindless end-of-the-year, write-all-the-papers-for-everything grind, as well as a bit sentimental to see what project I had active at once and what I was working on n months or years ago. This is something I actually don’t keep track of – I never think if I have “too many” things being built at once, because you can never build too many things at once, right?

So I’ve compiled all of this information in a cheesy little infographic.

And an appended version with obstrusive text everywhere:

I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece, but I think it gets the point across: I build way too much stuff.

The terms and conditions are listed in the image itself. In short, though, everything red is some kind of robot, everything blue is some kind of vehicle, and everything green falls into the “other” category that are neither. Since my builds are so far dominated by robots and vehicles, it was a good enough clasification.

The stacked time blocks are actually a little misleading. At some points, it seems to imply that I was simultaneously working on 5 things at once – and that may have been true mentally, as in I was probably designing 5 things at once in my head, but none of it implies I was working on something constantly day-to-day. You could collapse them down to one row and have it make more sense. The start and end dates for a block are just when I first and last posted about the subject – there may be weeks in between where nothing was completed or updated, such as during LOLrioKart’s build.

2009 seems a bit empty… but that’s mostly because LOLrioKart really did take up a significant amount of that time, and back then I was… uhh… more academically coupled than now. The kart, for better or worse, has been my longest running project due to its complexity and the amount of motor controller headsmashing I did for it. Otherwise, I was always working on some form of scooter. The class-related blocks only convey portions of the class that I held a special interest or was personally involved in more than just for academic purposes. That’s why Face Vector Modulation only takes up one month with the 6.131 block. The Sushibots were the 2.009 term project that my group settled on; and while I didn’t make any posts on the site explicitly about them, they sure took up alot of time.

It looks like my worst project ADD occurred last summer and fall. And I certainly do remember it as such – ideally, this coming summer will be full of more of the same.

Actually, forget this coming summer. I hope forever is filled with more of the same.