This semester is in the books

So I know I haven’t posted here in a while, but I have had a few things that I wanted to get down and they take more that a facebook post.


This semester is in the books officially. I actually woke up this morning about 4:30, and got my last grade. But before I start that lets go back to the start of this semester.

I have been at L3 for 2 year actually 3 years now, and been a co-op this whole time. Because I was a senor this year, I was eligible for a raise. When HR reviewed my grades and school schedule I was called in. Apparently there is a requirement of being a fulltime student and required cumulative GPA. I wasn’t meeting either requirement. Funny how I had been there for two years and this was the first I had heard of it. I was asked if I was planning on raising my GPA this semester, as I already was registered for full time. It was strongly hinted that if I didn’t meet these requirements I would no longer be working for L3. This was extremely annoying, because I was doing the job just fine. I had actually trained someone else on the part of job. So this was kind of ominous.

Plus I needed to take the FE again. This is the certification exam. It s 8 hours long and I didn’t pass it last year. The U requires mechanical engineers to pass the FE to graduate. So another big step in needed to accomplish this semester.

The semester when as well as it could. I apply for graduation as I was on track and I put the efforts in that I knew I needed to get better grades. This meant that I only work 20 hours or so at L3 but figured that was OK because my school performance was more important that my work performance according to HR. Anyway I did have some problems with my Ergonomic class, I was one of the lowest scores on the first test and the first lab, but I started to understand the teacher and well I aced the final and the project. The project I worked with my senior design team and we all did great.

My ethics class and my American Indian studies classes were going great. Of course I felt like if I got less than an A- in these classes I had done something wrong.

Senor deign was not going great. Our project was coming along but when we did our presentation, it didn’t go over well. So we kind of overcompensated without final report. It was 65 pages long. Now I have had reports at L3 that were in the 100 pages long, but none of my college reports had been this long, but we felt it was needed.

So anyway, grades started coming out last week. Ergo was first. I got a B-. I was feeling good about that, but I started to wonder what I needed to get my cumulative GPA up enough for L3. So being the nerd that I am I found how the GPA is calculated and built a spreadsheet. This gave me a good idea what I needed to get the right GPA. I was able to change the grade and see how they affected the cumulative. So I had an idea of what I needed. My Ethic grade came out next. An A-. I guess I should have done the extra report. But this tells me I did better on the final than I had thought. I just didn’t feel good about my arguments, but that’s another post.

Then yesterday when I got to work there was an email notifying me of my FE results. Of course their website was overloaded so it took a few hours to get to my results, but I had passed. What a relief, anther step towards graduation done.

So looking good, then Indian studies posted it grade. I got an A. I did do the extra report for this class. So I played with my spreadsheet and knew that if I got a C+ in design I was good. I would have raised my GPA up 9% (and yes I did figure that out). I know doesn’t sound like much but it would be enough.

Well I woke up this morning after a strange dream and logged on to the schools site. My last grade had posted. I got a B. I did it.

I’m not sure why I needed to write all of this down. It doesn’t even touch the headaches of this semester. I didn’t even talk about not being able to register for a month. But even that has worked out. I guess I just needed to get it out. Thanks for listening(or reading)

Laters