Jeudi. Jovedi. Thursday. It doesn’t matter what language you say it in, it was a Thursday and that meant having my terrible circuits lab. I was already dreading it when I woke up at 9:00 this morning. After breakfast, I had to be productive because I didn’t get any work done last night due to he wine tasting.
My main objective this morning was the circuits pre-lab. It was pretty much identical to the problem we did in tutorial yesterday, so it didn’t take too long. After the pre-lab, I worked on a few exercises for French class, then made my lunch for later.
I must have been running later than I thought, because I had to do a hundred meter dash for the bus today. I caught the bus, so it ended up not being a problem and I made it to class without any problems.
French class was very normal and we did more practice with direct and indirect pronouns. I was pretty surprised to learn that I only had one more French class until the final. Our French and culture classes aren’t part of the same school as our engineering classes and are on a different schedule. My engineering classes will go on for a few weeks later.
After class I went to the cafeteria with Nick and Harry in typical Thursday tradition. I used this time as a mental break before my circuits lab. I ended up heading lab a little early to review my pre-lab with some others and get a head start on the lab.
Considering this was my fourth AC circuits lab, I had given up all hope on not being here for close to six hours. I actually found what we were learning interesting, but we had to collect an annoying amount of data points. We then had to graph all the data, analyze the graph, then explain all this in writing for our report. We realized we made a mistake in our graph, and had to redo a bunch of points and all the analysis. This took a frustrating amount of time.
We had to the whole process again, but this time with a band-pass filter in our circuit instead of a low-pass one. Once I graphed all our data points, I realized part of my graph looked wrong again. I checked about fifteen points over again. Checking each point meant: adjusting the frequency on the wave-form generator, changing the scale and trigger setting on the oscilloscope to display the two sine waves, measuring the amplitude of each wave, and putting these voltage values into two separate logarithmic equations. Safe to say this was really annoying.
The Two sine waves (representing the voltage through the capacitor and generator)
Five hours after the lab started, we were on the last part. We didn’t have time to fully finish since our professor said we were out of time. I was not complaining at all since I was more than ready to leave. The last section won’t count for much in the report anyway.
On the tram ride home, I had a nice conversation with my lab partner Vesko. He is Bulgarian and we talked about French education. We started talking about the student protests going on in France and how French education differed from our home countries. Telling Vesko how expensive US education was really made think about the absurdity of its price. French university only costs 200 Euros a semester, and honestly isn’t much lower in quality. This makes me really wonder about the value of a French engineering degree versus an American one.
I asked Vesko why he came to study in France instead of Bulgaria. He told me that the STEM careers really aren’t supported well in Bulgaria. If you’re like Vesko and want to study physics, he said you’re sort of obligated to leave the country for college. He was attracted to Grenoble due to its high profile for physics and science. With the high number of research labs here, that is definitely true.
I was soon at my stop and said goodbye to Vesko. On my walk home, I randomly found a 10 euro note blowing in the wind. I looked around and didn’t see anyone, so I took the 10 euros. I guess today was my lucky day, though I would much rather pay ten euros to have my lab be three hours shorter.
Me and the ten euros
When I got back it was nearly time for dinner. For an appetizer, we had tomatoes with hard boiled eggs and some filling inside them. The main course was sausage, sweet rice, and cabbage wrapped ham. It was a strange combination, but tasted pretty good. I had a ton of great practice with my French at dinner tonight. I told A-M about how we had the wine tasting and a bunch of people got drunk accidentally. She thought this was funny.
After dinner, I went hard on my blog posts. I had to write the one for yesterday and the one you’re reading currently. This took way longer than it should have, but the more I write, the better. I was looking at my statistic for this blog recently and found out I have written over 100,000 words. That’s equivalent to a 400 page book. At least these blogs will be helpful when I eventually write my auto-biography.
I heard rumors from my French friends that there would be demonstrations at school tomorrow. Students were planning to block the science building in a similar fashion to the one Jessica and some of my friends experienced the other day. Tomorrow is the last day before vacation, so I really would not mind if classes are cancelled. I guess I will have to find out tomorrow morning.
After writing my two blog posts, I watched an episode of the Sopranos and went to bed.
Foreign Tourist with No Grasp of the Local Language 
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