I want to do a “State of My Union” blog, but I need some time to construct.

So for now, I’ll give you a quick rundown of what I’m looking forward to for the next 11 weeks.

IE 337 is a Manufacturing Processes class. Paging through the textbook, it looks like some chemistry, at least at the beginning, and it’s almost a little reminiscent of physics, without the rigorous theory. But it’s a lot more relevant and practical than a general physics course, and some of the subjects explored would be immediately relevant to industry.

IE 366 is an Ergonomics class. It’ll be interesting to see what it’s like, but this is as hard-core a design course as I imagine I’ll get in the Industrial Engineering course of study. But I don’t think it’s all that quantitative, so the material itself is going to have to be interesting for me to enjoy it. It’s the closest I’ll get to A&P (Anatomy and Physiology), too, all you health care types. We get to study the human body a little bit.

IE 411 is a Visual Basic programming class. I don’t know what to expect here at all. The department head has taken great pains to assure us that they will not turn us into bleary-eyed code-pounders. I’ve taken one other programming class in my life, and I liked a lot of it. But I’ve heard this guy piles on the work. We’ll see.

IE 356 is Design of Experiments, a class in which you use statistical techniques and analysis to improve processes and systems by running tests on them and, I assume, changing them accordingly. It should be fun; if I want a quantitative geek numbers class, then I should be in my glory. Some pages in the textbook have enough nasty mathematics to scare a calculus teacher. It could get old, though. It looked a little tiresome.

And then there’s NE (Nuclear Engineering) 319, which is a class about the contemporary issues raised by nuclear power. I can take it S/U (Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory), so I won’t be spending a whole lot of time on it. I couldn’t even find a textbook for it. But it should be a nice break from constant barrage of technical stuff in my other classes. Maybe we’ll get a little discussion going on, who know. It’s from 7-10 every Tuesday night.