An Exam to Remember

The F.E. Exam, or Fundamentals of Engineering Exam, took place on Saturday, April 12th this year. I failed to remember about it until around 10pm Friday night, even though I'd been telling myself to remember it all week. In any case, it was a horrid affair. I went to bed at midnight on Friday night, and roused myself from slumber at 6am. Upon completing my normal morning routine, I jumped in my car and grabbed a McGriddle before heading out to the test site.

I arrived at the Classroom building on Georgia State campus at 7:15am to find a couple hundred engineers sitting around in a hallway like homeless folk. The registration person was nowhere in sight. I found some folks I knew (because apparently everyone is from GT, just about), and spent the next half hour lolly-gagging because there was nothing better to do. At 7:45am, someone started walking out the door, and everyone followed. We were led to some building around the corner, and upon entering, we were filtered into rooms based on our seat number that was on our entrance pass. Mine was on the 6th floor. The beginning sounded very much like the SATs or the ACTs did back in highschool, the usual shpeal about the rules and filling in dots and such. Upon completion of the instructions, we were given 4 hours to complete 120 engineering questions.

This is where the F.E. became far different from the SAT/ACT. These questions were actually engineering questions, we were forced to use normal calculators when an actual TI-89 quality calculator would have been greatly helpful. They supplied a giant book of equations from all sects of engineering for the test, but looking up equations takes time, and we were only given 2 minutes per question. I used the book and am fairly certain that my first 70 answers are correct. Unfortunately, at this point I had 50 questions left and only 1 hour. The rest of the questions were answered in a flurry of what I have come to call "Engineer's Intuition", which means that I read the question carefully, looked through the answers, maybe did a few quick calculations, then took the best guess. Luckily, I believe the test was designed for this, because I was at least 80% sure of most of my answers on those 50 questions.

Oh if only my story concluded at the closing of the morning session, but no, this blog entry must continue! We were given an hour break, and then filtered back into our rooms for yet another 4 hour exam in the afternoon. This exam was more specific to the field of engineering that the taker majored in. We were given 4 hours to answer 60 harder engineering questions. I took the Electrical Engineering exam, and though I feel I was better prepared for it than most, there were a few questions that I wasn't readily able to answer. In any case, I finished this exam in 3 hours and was able to finally go home and crash.

In other news, studying is really hard to do. It's really hard to bring myself to do. It's even harder to admit to myself that I'm just procrastinating like I always do, and that I need to stop playing games (literally) and start actually giving a damn about school. I loathe school, I swear, every single problem we complete is useless, brainpower and time put to complete things that won't help anyone or do a darned thing. I can't wait to do work that is actually significant in some form or fashion to someone. In any case, yeah, I need to be ready for these exams. I have 3 on April 28th and 1 on May 2nd. Yes, I know I am allowed by the school to move one, but the teacher I'd have to ask is a pain in the ass, and I don't want to take the test on Saturday the 3rd. I'm going to try to move the exam on May 2nd to the week before finals so that I can be completely done with school on April 28th. If I can do that, then I'll get an actual week before work in to rest up and recover.

Even though I'm trying to stop playing games so much, I might as well say a few things I've noticed while playing Horizons. As soon as I joined up in the game around 45 days ago, I immediately researched everything I could to get through the learning curve. Soon after this, I found an informative group in-game that was able to teach me the information I couldn't find elsewhere. Once I was finally up to date on things (around a week ago), I began working with the leader of the group, C`gan, who is also a well-respected member of the game (been playing for over 4 years), to restart a team effort to build up different parts of the game-world. There was a team for this 2 or 3 years ago that everyone seemed to like, but in the end, beuracracy took hold and tore it apart (like it always does when left unchecked).

Based on this experience and many of my AIESEC experiences, I'd characterize my personality upon entering any world/situation as one of the "Young and Vocal Upstart", someone who gets shutdown by the real realities of a situation and/or the past-attempts of other vocal people. With experience, I'll probably become the "Old and Quiet Fart Who Gets Things Done", like my dad. We can only hope that day comes soon, but until then, I'm going to annoy the hell out of each and every one of you with my bright-eyed cheery hopefullness and close-following pessimistic optimism. :)