Building a Compost Sifter

My E4 team has been building for the past few weeks, and our compost sifter is finally nearing completion! All we have left to build are the cam (which will lift and drop the frame) and the screen holder.

Here are some pictures of our accomplishment!


This is Claire, standing in front of the lumber we used to build the compost sifter. We used 4 by 4's for the front post and 2 by 4's for the rest of the frame.


Some of the wood we just screwed together with 4" screws. (We had to drill pilot holes first, or the screws would get stuck.)


For corners, we used brackets to hold the wood together and then screwed the brackets to the wood.



This is Daniel bracing the frame of the compost sifter while someone (not shown in picture) drills on another part of the frame. Our sifter will be a little over 4 feet tall when we're finished.

This is the almost-finished sifter (minus screen and cam). When it's finished, there will be an aluminum pole on the front with a cam on it. When the cam spins, the frame that holds the screen will raise and then drop, forcing the compost through the screen.

That's a picture of the screen-holder frame lifted up from the rest of the sifter. The rubber that will cushion its fall (to make it not deafeningly loud) is from an old bike tire that the Pitzer bike shop gave us.

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E4 has, at times, been really fun. Building this compost sifter was fun (for the first 2 consecutive hours in the machine shop; after that, I get bored and have to take a break). My current group is really awesome--we're pretty laid-back, so it's easy not to get stressed even when we have a lot to do. Other parts of E4 have been less fun--for example, being in the shop at 11:30 on a Saturday night, trying to learn how to do carpentry for the first time (while building), and not knowing the physics you need to know to model all of your designs (some of which have pretty complicated physics). The engineering curriculum here is a lot of work. When I say a lot of work, I mean a lot of work. My team spent most of Friday and Saturday building. (We did it in 2-person shifts, so we didn't all have to be there the whole time, but that's still a lot of time in the machine shop.) We still have some building to do, and then we have to finish writing up a tech memo which sums up everything we did and then make a presentation detailing everything we did. If you really enjoy every part of the engineering process--not just the design and the building, but the write-ups and the presentations and the organizational things--then you'll love it. If you're like me, you like designing and building things, but not all the other stuff. I'm changing my major to CS because the other stuff is a substantial enough portion of the engineering curriculum to deter me. I still like building stuff. I still like figuring out how things work. I just can't make myself interested enough in all the other parts of the engineering curriculum to really enjoy an engineering major. I really liked CS my first semester. Programming and engineering are really quite similar--you're trying to make a [thing] that performs [function]. So, in a sense, I'll still be making things. Just different things than I thought I would make when I first came to Mudd.

Schedule

Other Mudder bloggers have been posting their assorted schedules. Mine's actually going to be pretty typical for a frosh changing majors to CS.

As a background note, Mudd has a core curriculum. Most students have finished it by the end of sophomore year. The core schedule is quite nice the summer before freshman year, when your friends are all talking about having to rush to their school's website to sign up for classes before they all fill up. Core classes take up progressively less time in your schedule as you go through more of the curriculum and help you figure out what you want to major in.

• Electricity, Magnetism, and Optics (abbreviated as E&M): The final core physics class. I'm also taking the associated lab for this class.
  
• Multivariable Calculus II & Introduction to Probability and Statistics: Core math classes, half a semester each.
  
• Introduction to Computer Science. I decided near the end of March that I wanted to major in CS, so I'm taking the first non-core CS class.
  
• Discrete Mathematics. This is a requirement for CS majors, but is also reputed to be quite a fun math class.
  
• Dickens, Hardy, and the Victorian Age. This is the unusual class in my schedule. Every 2 years, Professors Groves (a literature professor) and Eckert (a Physics professor) teach a class that consists of reading, discussing, and writing about books written by Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy. The class culminates in a trip to England over the second half of winter break.

This is a pretty normal schedule for a third semester: it contains the core Physics class (and its lab), two half-semester core math classes, a class in a major I'm seriously considering, a humanities class, and a fifth class.

Common variations on the third-semester schedule:

• Some freshmen take the rest of the core math program over the summer, opening up 3 hours of space(an average class) in their schedule. Most of them fill that space with a technical elective.
  
• The "fifth class" is STEMS, the core engineering class. Most of the people who do this are engineers, because STEMS is a prerequisite for a lot of engineering classes.
• The "fifth class" is the required Biology class. This frees up 3 hours of space in the spring.
• The "fifth class" is a Humanities class. People who do this are usually taking E&M and two difficult technical classes. Whether or not this actually decreases your workload is debatable, but it does give you more space in your week wherein you're not doing problem sets.
  

Prefrosh Weekend

I was going to put up a bunch of pictures of happy laughing prefrosh. But most of them didn't want me to take their picture, so instead:



Mudders, looking for prefrosh, so that the Mudders can show the prefrosh where their dorms are.




Yay, it's Prefrosh Weekend!


Other than that, it's time for some Fun Mudd Facts!

Fun Fact #1:
Mudd has 4 "quad" dorms. They are shaped like the letter "U" and are the closest to things like the dining hall and the classrooms. They are laid out and named like this:

South-----------------North

West------------------East

There's actually a reason they have those names:
In the beginning, Mudd had one dorm: East. It was called "East" because it was the eastmost building on campus. North and West were built after East. North was north of East, and West was west of East. So, of course, those dorms were called "North" and "West." Then Mudd built a fourth dorm. Mudders, seeing that there was a fourth dorm and four cardinal directions, began calling it "South."
South was, and still is, the northernmost of all the dorms. But Mudders don't let that stop them from calling it "South."

Fun Fact #2:
Mudd has a relatively large building known as "Platt." The first floor contains offices and a large open space with lots of couches. The second floor has Jay's (a pizza place), the offices for Facilities and Maintenance (F&M), and a large music practice room.
Platt used to be Mudd's dining hall. Platt is no longer Mudd's dining hall because Platt is way too small to be Mudd's dining hall. But it makes a pretty nice building for offices and the Platt living room.

Fun Fact #3:
The Mudd campus gently slopes downhill from the dorms to the classrooms. This makes skateboarding (or scootering, or bicycling, or rollerblading) to class very simple. Based on a completely nonscientific visual survey of people I see going to class in the morning, I'd say between one-third and one-half of all Mudders take some sort of wheeled transportation to class. Of those, about half are skateboarders. Of the remaining users of wheeled transportation, about two-thirds use bikes, and most of the rest use scooters. I also regularly see two people who rollerblade to class.
(It's also highly recommended that you use some form of wheeled transportation if you take a class at another of the 5Cs, especially if you take a class at Pomona. Why? Pomona is about a mile away, and you have 10 minutes between classes.)

There may be more pictures during the weekend (especially if my E4 group begins building this weekend). If not, look for my update next week!

Assorted Update

A while back, I went to the Getty Museum with a friend of mine. As it turns out, getting to the Getty without a car is time-consuming, but not too hard. We took a train to downtown L.A., then took a bus to another bus to the museum. Our motivation: the Getty is free.



This is a fountain at the Getty Museum. The Getty is one of the few art museums I've seen that is artfully designed, instead of being an assortment of blocky square rooms with tan and gray walls.



This is the view from the top balcony of the Getty museum, which is on top of a hill near downtown L.A.

The Getty has a nice permanent art collection as well as good traveling exhibits, so we got to see a lot of quality art while we were there. (There aren't any pictures of the art, because it was all inside.) I also got to see some illuminated manuscripts, which was really neat.

Second: Some friends of mine are going to be Time Suck next year. Time Suck is a suite in East, traditionally made up of sophomores, whose job is to entertain East Dorm with movies, small parties, marathons of TV shows, and the like. I'm pretty excited, because this means I'll be able to help organize all the fun that Time Suck plans.

I've been inundated with coupons for pizza and Bed Bath and Beyond recently. (Tip: if you want a lot of coupons from Bed Bath and Beyond, have them ship you something. They will send you coupons for the rest of your natural life.) This puts me in an interesting situation for two reasons. First, the pizza coupons are all things like "10% off a medium pepperoni pizza and a side of chicken". I'm a vegetarian, so I'm definitely not ordering a pepperoni pizza anytime soon. Second, I'm never going to use my Bed Bath and Beyond coupon, because I don't have a car and I already have everything I would buy from Bed Bath and Beyond (with the possible exception of a chair that, despite my liking for it, would take up too much of the remaining floor space in my dorm room). I'm giving the BBB coupons to next year's Time Suck, on the grounds that Time Suck could always use one more bean bag chair, but I still can't find anyone who wants a cheap pepperoni pizza.

In other Mudder news, this Sunday starts the Accepted Students Program. During this program, the campus gains an extra 150 to 200 people--prospective students (known as "prefrosh") who've been accepted to Mudd and have decided to visit. (Although prefrosh can visit at other times, the school has a lot of special prefrosh activities during ASP.) Although I can't host prefrosh (because I currently live on Scripps), I'll be taking prefrosh to their host's dorms on Sunday morning and entertaining the prefrosh that all of my friends will be hosting. I'll also be carrying my camera around, so look forward to pictures of prefrosh weekend sometime this week.

That's all for this week, folks. I'll see you next week with tales of ASP.

Quick Room Draw Update

All of my friends have guaranteed rooms in places they'd be happy living. Huzzah!

Room Draw Room Draw Revolution

I haven't posted in a while because we had Spring Break and then I realized the week after that it was Room Draw Season.

For those unfamiliar with the term, Room Draw is the process by which Mudders obtain rooms for the next school year. It's also one of the most stressful parts of the year. You see, we Mudders are not competitive people. Teachers don't grade on a curve, so you don't have to beat your fellow students to get a good grade--you just have to do well. The same cannot be said of Room Draw. There are, in fact, a finite number of rooms on campus. This means that if you get the room you want, you're keeping someone else from getting the room they want. This is especially true of singles, which are the most coveted rooms on campus due to their one-person occupancy. Through a strange series of events (which started when the person I'd been planning to room with decided to room with someone else and ended when, after the 4th person I wanted to room with said she'd be leaving Mudd, a rising senior decided to pull me into a single), I have an East single for next year. This is pretty unusual, because I'll only be a sophomore next year. There were some juniors who were upset about it, because they wanted to live in an East single next year and now won't be able to. They'll be over it pretty soon, but there was quite a lot of tension over it for a week or so. Also, because of the way Room Draw works, I already have a room, but most of my friends don't. (Rising seniors pick rooms first, then rising juniors, then rising sophomores.) I'm not worried about most of them, but there are a few who are picking rooms late (room draw order is decided randomly) who may wind up living in a dorm that really doesn't match them. Everything should turn out okay, though.

In case anyone is wondering, the typical Mudd housing cycle looks like this:
Freshmen live in every dorm on campus. They're assigned rooms based on the personality of the dorm or suite they'll be living in. With a few exceptions, freshmen have doubles. (A few have triples, but the freshman triples have about as much space per person as a typical Mudd double. A few others live in singles in South.)
After freshman year, you pick your own room. Because there are limited quantities of nicer rooms, this is what usually happens:
Sophomores generally live in doubles. A few choose to live in triples or quads, because triples and quads have more space per person than the average Mudd double. (The tradeoff is that, if you live in a triple or a quad, you have 2 or 3 roommates, instead of just one.) Sophomore rooms and freshman rooms are about the same size. (My situation is unusual, and is the result of Eastie folks being nice. All of my other friends will be living in doubles. One will be probably be living in the same room she's living in this year.)
About one-third of juniors live in singles. The rest live in doubles. Because juniors pick rooms before sophomores, many juniors usually wind up living in larger doubles than sophomores and freshman. (For example, "L doubles" and "long doubles," normally inhabited by juniors, have about as much floor space as 2 singles. Some inhabitants of long doubles and L doubles put up curtains that effectively turn the double into 2 singles.)
Almost all seniors live in singles, because there are about 200 singles on campus and about 170 people in any given senior class.

My E4 group is building a compost sifter for Pitzer for our final project. We'll probably be prototyping in a few weeks, so there's a good chance I won't be updating then. After all, prototyping is the part of the design process in which you and your friends spend a weekend in the machine shop.