It's Friday afternoon and I am done with my first week of school. I definitely hit the ground running, making it almost seem as if I never even had time off. After my first week, here are my impressions:
Clinical Engineering: I have a lecture and lab for this class, both on Monday. The subject should be interesting, but I've received feedback from other students who have either taken the class or had the professor lecture in another course and have said that as a lecturer he could be better. We'll have to see on that one because it's hard to tell after only one meeting. The lab section of the class is going to be difficult. The major project we will be working on is modelling the cardiovascular system, which will be super cool, using a program called LabView. The only experience I've had with this program was senior year at Stanford in the devil class ("Intro" to Sensors) and it wasn't fun. Hopefully it won't be as painful this time.
Biomaterials: Finally in my element. I've had three lectures so far (Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday) and will add in a tutorial next week, but we began the class by talking about hard and soft tissues and their mechanical properties. Surprisingly, I am one of only two people in the class with an engineering background, so I realized that once he began throwing around terms like stress, strain, elasticity, anisotropy and Young's modulus, that I finally have a leg up. He showed pictures of stress-strain curves and I knew what they were...it was a good feeling. I think I'm going to like this class, especially because our professor is a biomechanical engineer himself. All of the research he references really catches my eye and I'm really excited to continue on with this guy. Our first assigned reading was a scientific paper about how bones respond to loading, and the author cited three different papers written by my Stanford advisor, Dennis Carter. I thought that was pretty cool, not only because I took an entire class on the subject already, but because I can say, "I know that guy!"
Tissue Engineering and Stem Cells: This is going to be the Medical Imaging class of this semester, meaning that I'll be spending the bulk of my time trying to wade through all of the information thrown at me. I only have two lectures (Tuesday and Wednesday) and a tutorial, but we are going to have to write two 4000-word papers (about 15 pages; one due in three weeks) and we'll have work to prepare for each tutorial section. In this first week we learned about the tissue engineering paradigm and how scientists have successfully grown a human ear on the back of an immuno-suppressed mouse (called the Vacanti mouse...look it up). Kind of crazy stuff. We also took a background quiz and from that I learned that I need to go back and brush up on some basic biology and organic chemistry...fun, fun, fun.
Anatomy and Physiology for Engineers: This was the shocker of the group because it's way different than I thought it was going to be/what I had prepared myself for. We only meet once a week and luckily last night we didn't take up the entire three hours, as was scheduled (I don't know how any brain can fully function for three hours, especially in the late afternoon). There was hardly any introduction to the course and we just jumped right in to learning about neurons and neural pathways and how this influences the types of prostheses we can successfully implant/attach to humans. It was really an amazing lecture, but next week, as well as every week after that, we will be getting something completely different. It was stated that the goal was to get us to think like engineers when we are faced with a medical problem. I think I'm going to like the course, especially because our only assessment throughout the semester is one 2000-word essay :)
That's all as far as classes go. It was quite stressful jumping back in, and I didn't even have any real tutorials or labs this week. The days seemed to fly by and if that's any indication of how the rest of the semester is going to go, then it's going to be over before I know it. This weekend I have to get started on my reading for the first Tissue Engineering tutorial as well as getting myself organized so I can begin my 15-page paper. It's been nice to settle back into a routine after being gone for so long, but I'm sad to say that I think my beautiful tan is beginning to fade. It's not nearly the type of weather where I can go outside in shorts and a tank top. In fact it's quite the opposite; I'm back to winter coats and scarves. It's okay because it's dry and at least the sun is out.
Lastly, I got hired to write for a website called WeekendNotes.com. It's basically just a place where people write about fun/cool things to do around Melbourne and other cities. The pay isn't spectacular, but I'm already tracking all the cool things I do so I might as well cut and paste it onto this website and get something out of it. If anything it will pay for my trip to the cinema to see Harry Potter!
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