Hello my die-heart fans dear blog readers, my name is Eduardo Pagnoncelli Lorandi ( my rice id is a little wrong BTW ) and well, it’s my first time in the US!
Since this is the first post in this personal blog, I think talking a bit about my past in Brazil and my arrival here would be interesting: I’m a Computer Engineering student at PUCRS, Porto Alegre, Brazil, I’m about 70% of my major completion, and I’m here to participate in the SEED program at OEDK. As said before, it’s my first time in the US, actually, first time outside Brazil overall, which makes me very excited!
Just to warn all, I’m completely not used to take photos, so this first post will probably have few to no photos, but I promise that I will try to get into the habit of taking pictures.
The arrival
I got at Rice at Friday, June 7th, around 6:00AM, and was happily greeted by Caz and Sammy ( if both of you are reading, sorry for making you guys wake up so soon ), whose showed me the campus, the dorms and how some things worked in the US. As expected, some of those were very different than Brazil, but nothing that I could get used soon!
After that, I had all the weekend to discovery more places and services, such as Rice Village, the Metro system, the university structure/environment, etc..
The campus
Man, this campus is HUGE!
Indeed the biggest impact for me was how different is an university student life in the US, compared to Brazil, and consequently this reflects to the University Campus itself. First of all, dorms are no such thing in Brazil, with that, things as multiple serveries, lots of sports fields, campus transportation and pub’s are rare and sometimes non existent in Brazilian Universities, which makes sense since there is no one living there to make use of those.
I spent almost the whole weekend walking up and down at the campus, so I’m already very familiarized with it, the shuttles schedules, the residential colleges, the serveries. I was so confident of this familiarization, that I decided to do some jogging at 9:00 pm on the tracking field that circles the campus. Well, let’s say that this tracking field doesn’t actually circles the campus completely, but nothing that some location awareness couldn’t solve!
The city
Geographically speaking, Houston do not differs that much of Porto Alegre: The climate, the humidity, the elevation, even somewhat the size are basically the same. Since this is my first week at Houston, I didn’t have much time to explore the city, taking apart going to Rice Village or The Galeria, I spent all the time at the campus, but one thing I’ve learned: Things are pretty far away, having a car/Metro card is very important.
OEDK and SEED
This was, of course, the first week of work at OEDK, which pretty much answered my initial question of: what exactly would be the activities at OEDK, and where I could apply my “70% Computer Engineer” pratical, TI-ish focused knowledge. For my surprise, the answer of the second question is: mostly none. And that’s a good thing!
The first week consisted of a bootcamp, where we would learn from videos that explain the overall Engineering Design Process, and applying this into the development of an Enrichment Device for the tapirs at the Houston Zoo. I found the content of the videos pretty interesting and refreshing, since I’ve never learn something similar at my home university, and it really made me realize how important it is to have a detailed and well structured procedure when developing a device, or solving an engineering problem in general.
This kind of work that we have been imposed in this week, and hopefully in the rest of the SEED experience, will probably not use my practical TI experiences I’ve acquired in the past, but will surely enhance my not-so-developed engineering skills to an impressive extent.