I suppose that going by idea is better than trying to cover the last week and a half chronologically, so I think I should start with our main project. Every year, all the Shads at all the campuses across Canada work to solve the same problem in small groups. There are six teams here at USask (I'm on team F). Our problem: How might we improve the comfort, efficiency and safety of year round, human-powered transport? Our group has been off to a bit of a rocky start, and we don't gel as much as our house group, but despite that we're well on our way, and I think things may be looking up (not to jinx it, of course). We're currently working on three separate ideas under what we decided was our umbrella problem of improving walking: either piezoelectric shoes, massage insoles, or a commuter encouragement program. Our team has nine members, so three of us were assigned to research each one and report on our progress at tomorrow's meeting. I've been working on the third, and I'm actually pretty happy with what I've come up with. I hope the rest of the group likes my ideas.
Every day we have organized rec from 11:30 to 12:30, and for the first week of the program my legs were in a perpetual state of soreness. I could barely force myself to walk across campus to the engineering building where our lectures are held, but I'm feeling much better now. I guess that's what the ringette off-season does to you, but I'm glad to be getting back in shape. Our rec activities are always something new and fun, be it dodgeball, kickball, ultimate frisbee, a zombie adventure across campus, or basketball. I forgot just how awesome games like basketball can be, seeing as I haven't played for years, and I'm having a great time experiencing new things and re-experiencing old ones.
Every morning from 8:30 until rec we're at the engineering building for lectures of some kind. They all revolve around this year's Shad theme of human powered transportation, which is a little disappointing seeing as it's not my favourite field to end all fields, but there are still so many interesting things to learn about. Our schedule is also dotted with things like workshops and projects, like the marble one I mentioned in my earlier entry. Over the first few days we worked on this project in our house groups to design an eco-hotel, which was a lot of fun. We split pretty naturally into a business and an engineering group with no one really having to act as leader, and it was such a remarkable experience. I wish our main group project went as smoothly as that. We also made a device to transport an egg 10m without human intervention -- ours was a car of sorts that had a stringed arm with an elastic band attached, and when the elastic was let go the string unraveled and the arm moved forward, propelling the car. Our design ended up placing second, although that project was in our main groups and wasn't exactly the most phenomenal experience for that reason. Still, we're beginning to work better together, and I think that despite these rocky starts we are going to end the project and the program strong.
Some of the other workshops I've attended have been one on critical thinking (which involved a lot of debate and was a blast), one on prototype design, and - this is the big one - I managed to get into the workshop to use the synchrotron! I was so excited, and still am! Today was the first of our four workshop sessions there, with another tomorrow and a third and forth next week. Today the ten of us just took a tour, got ID badges done, and learned about what our experiment must entail. Tomorrow we'll begin preparations, and next Wednesday is our beamtime. After our official Shad Valley day ended at ten o'clock, we had an informal meeting of the Synchrotron team to discuss our experiment, which we must have fully designed by tomorrow. It had to involve either bike chain lubricant or bike tires, so what I believe we've decided to go with is to apply a variety of different types of lubricants to chain segments, then use the synchrotron to deduce the amount of iron converted to ferrous oxide, thereby being able to state that the "best" lubricant is the one that caused the least amount of ferrous oxide conversion. Hopefully all goes as planned; some tensions are obvious amongst those ranks as well, and I can see trouble going down tomorrow if some of the others object. But even that, and all the homework entailed, isn't enough to get me down. I don't care what kind of experiment we do -- IT'S AN ACTUAL PARTICLE ACCELERATOR THAT WE ARE ALLOWED TO USE! I AM ECSTATIC NO MATTER WHAT!
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| This is the view when you first walk past reception... it's breathtaking. |
A few other things have happened as well. Weekends are still extremely busy, but they're more focused on play than work. We went "camping" this weekend past (note the quotation marks), which basically meant we stayed in a beautiful wood lodge called Shekinah. It was wonderful -- there were quite a lot of mosquitoes (they were extremely bad on campus last week, although this one is a bit better), but with a bit of bug spray and some bulky clothes you were fine. We played lots of card games... there was this one called Jungle Speed which was extremely violent (and extremely fun... basically you have to grab the totem whenever another player flips up a card that matches yours, and the two of you wrestle it out), and another called Set that was pretty great (and I'm not just saying that because for some reason I won every match). We didn't just stay inside playing cards, either. Despite the fact that I pictured Saskatchewan as Flatland, Shekinah was in a valley. A beautiful, beautiful valley. We climbed to the top of the hill for a picnic snack, and the view was just incredible.
It's already almost midnight curfew and I have to brush my teeth, so I guess that marks the end of today's update. I'll try to report again when I can, but we'll see how time flies.
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