Time in California is short. Yes, a day here is the same as a day in Europe. It's just that more seems to happen in a day here than in a day back in London. I put that down to the volume of 'things' that happen here.
There's a recurring entry in my 'Weekend' Wunderlist list that says 'Blog Post'. It's been taunting me for the last few weeks as the due date of 'Sun 18 Aug' turned from black to red and stayed that way, glaring angrily at me everytime I practiced David Allen's GTD weekly list review.
I'll go back in time to the two weeks of bootcamp in the next post but for now I'm going to concentrate on the time after that.
Semester started on Thursday the 29th of August. I had previously thought this was just an artefact of the strange way Cambridge schedules its terms but it seems that this habit was carried over the Atlantic too. The beginning of that week was ostensibly empty for returning grad students but spent in hours of orientation for us newly enrolled students.
EECS orientation was moderately interesting, although clearly geared more towards the research focussed PhD and Master's students. Still, some interesting facts were revealed - including that the EECS MEng students (i.e. people like me) in years past often used to spend most of their weekends working (unlike other engineering disciplines). I was also able to find out more detailed selectivity numbers - while our program was less selective than the MS/PhD program (which has an acceptance rate of 6%), it still had a respectable 15% acceptance rate, and about a 5% enrolment rate (i.e. 20 enrolled out of 420 applicants).
EECS is a big discipline here at Berkeley, no doubt due to Cal's heritage in the area. Notable alumni include Steve Wozniak, Bill Joy (one of the founders of Sun Microsystems) and Eric Schmidt. The introductory computer science class supposedly has 1100 undergraduates enrolled in it this year. Astonishing. We also have a lounge lovingly named 'The Woz' and a sponsored 'Vodafone' lab.
After orientation, Gita, Yong and I set to work putting the finishing touches on two drones - an EasyStar foam fixed wing aircraft and a 3D Robotics hexacopter. After spending a day getting them up and running, we took them down to the Berkeley Marina on Wednesday evening. I quickly managed to crash the EasyStar resulting in a clean shear in the foam body that went over the wing. Under Yong's control, the Hex had one clean, slightly wobbly flight and made it down again. The second flight however caused it to lose control - and it quickly was picked up by the wind. Despite cutting the throttle, it refused to return to the ground and the wind took it off into the distance over a small hill. After it passed over the hill, it dropped out of the sky and we ran over to where it came down.
Sadly, just beyond the hill was an inland body of water that was an extension of the Bay itself. The drone had actually made it 10 feet over the water before the power cut. By the time we arrived, little was visible of the drone except for bubbles that were escaping to the surface. We thought this was the batteries exploding but it later turns out this was the capacitors on the six ESCs blowing. I found this rather amusing but the gravitas of the situation was clear - we'd just sunk a $1200 drone. I later realised that the autopilot driving the drone was mine, so I was (at least, partially) invested in its death.
Gita, being the absolute hero that he is, later went back at low tide (1 am) with a wet suit and combed the floor of the Bay looking for the drone. Sure enough, he found it. Yong and I woke up in the morning and were concerned that we hadn't heard from Gita - but he eventually resurfaced (online, I mean) and we acquired a new sense of respect for him!
Classes started on Thursday afternoon and were generally extremely crowded. There is no penalty at Berkeley for signing up to multiple classes for the first two weeks. This allows people to sample various classes before deciding what they'd actually like to take for credit. I was part of this group - being undecided between which two of Computer Vision, Introduction to Robotics and Advanced Robotics I'd like to take. In the end I settled on Computer Vision and Advanced Robotics - both of which are fascinating courses and the latter of which is likely to result in an early mathematics-induced retirement to my cremation chamber.
American classes generally tend to have 3 hours a week of lectures - spread over two sessions. In addition, instructors (usually professors and their teaching assistants) hold 'office hours' where you can go and ask them questions about their course content. Finally, each class has homework - considerable exercises or problem sets which typically take two full days of work to finish.
I'm coming to the end of my first batch of homeworks - and they are time consuming and exhausting. Given my generally poor and now rusty knowledge of maths, I'm struggling to remember facts that were once at the front of my mind seven years ago! This has been a stressful experience that I hope will get easier. Additionally, the office hours frustrate me, generally because you have to contend with many other students for the instructor's time. This can be painful, especially when they're asking questions about a part of the homework that you have yet to get to.
On the other hand, the homework for the 'engineering leadership' class I'm taking (which is a mandatory part of my MEng program) has been surprisingly easy. I guess I've always been a glutton for reading and writing though and most of it has been reading and writing based. It is my escape from maths.
The homework situation was compounded by our decision to visit the UAS West conference in San Diego - a industry focussed UAS (unmanned aerial systems) conference to which we gained free admittance. We left Berkeley at about 6pm on Thursday evening, reaching San Diego at sometime after 2am - on the whole a rapid drive down. After sleeping for a few hours at the waterfront flat of an acquaintance's friends in La Jolla (hot tip: it's not pronounced how it sounds, at all), we woke up to attend a morning of talks. The talks were mainly centred around the military and military uses of UAS technology - which were interesting but perhaps not directly relevant to our project to bring drone technology to the civilian market.
That afternoon, we visited the 3D Robotics head office, which was the drone hacker's equivalent of visiting Santa's Workshop. There were large screens, soldering stations and quadcopters everywhere. We chatted to our contacts there for a bit and started the long drive back to Berkeley - trying our best to avoid the Los Angeles rush hour.
Sadly, in a misguided attempt to beat the rush hour traffic, we ended up a long way off track. After we recovered back onto the I5 interstate, we ended up back off track when we sleepily took a wrong turn. These detours added a good two hours to our trip - arriving back to Berkeley at 2:30am, a full 11.5 hours later. On the plus side, we stopped at an excellent sushi restaurant in Bakersfield called Sushiko. Paraphrasing Gita, 'it's surprising to find good sushi in Bakersfield, out of all places'.
Despite all the driving, we made it back to Berkeley with a full Saturday to spare. The fatigue had hit us both though and it took the weekend to recover. The homework wasn't waiting though and I spent the rest of the weekend (and most of the week) diving headfirst into the wonderful world of MatLab.
