More Adventures

Purdue University

Today the the REU teams went and visited the civil and mechanical engineering research facilities at Purdue University. The civil research building was awesome... some high-tech expensive equipment, not to mention the building was huge. To give you an example there was a 3 or 4 story slab concrete structure built inside of it (about the size of a small apartment building) that they were going to do some failure tests with. They had two massive overhead cranes that spanned over 100 feet. The mechanical engineering research facility wasn't that sweet at all. We met with grad students from each program, and i found that the civil engineering projects didn't suck. The ME grad/doctorate student we spoke with was doing numerical analysis (4 years of it...) yah, maybe ME grad school isn't for me.
The campus was very pretty. It was also nice to see real humans. Rose-Hulman has a pretty big concentration of super-nerds (yes more nerdy than me, jerks... These guys make Bill Gates look like a GQ model). So being at Purdue i actually saw girls... and decent looking ones at that. Oh yah, there was a national sorority conference going on, so that didn't hurt the situation. :) We've learned that being on campus guys quickly get "Rose Goggles," a close cousin to the beer goggles. Rose goggles make an average, to less than average girl look REALLY good. During the school year, the ratio is about 8 guys to 1 girl. I'm really glad i dont go here full time. Anyway... You all probably think i'm shallow now...whatever. ;)
This last week my team went to the Vigo county courthouse and went through the security assessment sheet from last year(what we're improving upon). We got the tour, took some measurements and took a bunch of pictures. It was build by a french architect back in 1884. It is a masonry structure, some steel, and covered in huge limestone blocks. In some places the walls are 4 feet thick. (just in case you cared). It was pretty nice to get out of the office... though i really dont feel like i'm there that often anyways. Well that's all the news i have for now. Thank you for all your emails and comments. I enjoy hearing from you all. Take care.