First Test, Week 2

Published: June 27, 2016

Today was our first “block” test – which covered several lessons out of our academics portion of class. We started off with the test first thing today. It went okay, but I wish I would’ve scored a perfect (I didn’t). Fortunately, this test is less than 1% of my overall grade, and there are only a few of them, majority of my grade (90%) will come from the final evaluations on the final days of class, so I’m trying not to worry a whole lot about it.

For the rest of the day, we got into Block 2 – more lessons from the book (we’ll be in the classroom until the end of next week, in case I didn’t mention that already). Today we covered slightly more practical topics such as airport lighting, instrument approaches, and airspace around the “academy” airport. Most of this was a review from school, certain parts were more in depth and will require a bit of memorization (my absolute favorite thing to do).

Most of the class has adopted a “quickly write down and memorize whatever the instructor says” philosophy. I can’t wait to watch this fail once we get into the lab portion of class (where 90% of the course grade comes from, mind you). This job, heck, this career, is not memorization of robotic phrases. When one loop gets thrown in the mix, you can’t revert back to what you wrote down in class six weeks ago, it just won’t work, because every situation is different and requires the know-how and mindset to figure out the problem, not rely on robotics repeated over and over. This job requires you to be very adaptable, fluid, and reactive at times, while still planning ahead and thinking 10 steps ahead. If you’re not 10 steps ahead, you’re behind. But I digress; we’ll see what works for everyone when push comes to shove in a few short weeks.

I’ve been running into alum from my school like crazy down here this week (last week I saw only a handful, I’m up to more than that just today. I think many of them were on nights last week which is why I didn’t see them. It’s really a small world and an even smaller field.

The rest of this week I’ll have two more block tests, and two more next week. Fortunately, I don’t have a test the day after the long weekend, so I’ll at least be able to relax for some part of the weekend. Labs start after that. I’m really looking forward to labs, in case you can’t tell.

Also, we had a little storm roll through last night, so that looked pretty cool too. Neat sunrise today too, behind the clouds.

Anyways… that’s all for now.

"spread your wings and fly"