This school year has gone by fast. I am currently in my second semester of my Junior year at South Dakota State University. Classes I am enrolled in are Thermodynamics II, Intermediate Microeconomics, Fluid Dynamics, Design of Machine Elements, Electrical Engineering I, and Vibrations.

I joined the SDSU Jacks Hockey Club this year, which has been a lot of fun. Our season ended this last weekend (2/12/99) in a close game that went into OT. We should have won, but the referees did not see a goal that we scored, and play continued without a score.

Study Study Study...You can usually find me at my house reading books and working on homework problems. If you believe this, I have some Jimmy Buffett concert tickets to sell you...wait a minute...I do have Jimmy Buffett tickets to sell you if you want them, anyway...I study quite a bit for these classes I am in. Sometimes it comes easy, and sometimes it does not.

Other than the occasional kegger and trip down to Royal River Casino, life couldn't get more complicated than it is now.

This school year has gone by fast. I am currently in my second semester of my Junior year at South Dakota State University. Classes I am enrolled in are Thermodynamics II, Intermediate Microeconomics, Fluid Dynamics, Design of Machine Elements, Electrical Engineering I, and Vibrations.

I joined the SDSU Jacks Hockey Club this year, which has been a lot of fun. Our season ended this last weekend (2/12/99) in a close game that went into OT. We should have won, but the referees did not see a goal that we scored, and play continued without a score.

Study Study Study...You can usually find me at my house reading books and working on homework problems. If you believe this, I have some Jimmy Buffett concert tickets to sell you...wait a minute...I do have Jimmy Buffett tickets to sell you if you want them, anyway...I study quite a bit for these classes I am in. Sometimes it comes easy, and sometimes it does not.

Other than the occasional kegger and trip down to Royal River Casino, life couldn't get more complicated than it is now.

My major at SDSU is mechanical engineering. This includes such things as designing (drawing) anything imaginable. Classes I have taken range from Calculus (hard math stuff,) to Statics (forces acting on objects that are stationary,) to Dynamics (Statics in motion,) to Engineering Materials (why materials behave as they do,) to Economic classes, and English classes.

Problems I could solve:

If you pull on a rod of steel 4 meters long (fixed at one end) with a 250 Newton force at the other end, how long will the rod stretch? What if the temperature of the rod was 50 F and changes to 94 F.

A barge is on a river, and is 60 meters long. Two cars at rest are at opposite ends of the barge. Car A accelerates at 2 m/h2 until it reaches 6 MPH. Car B accelerates at 3.8 m/h2 until it reaches 8 MPH. What point will the cars collide with respect to the barge? How far will the barge move as a result of the moving cars

The Engineering Expo was held in May at SDSU. The expo was a contest day with a variety of engineering related activities. A few are: Bridge design (build a bridge that can hold the most weight,) Tower design (had a half an hour to build the tallest tower out of newspapers,) and my entry was in the Rock Retriever.

The Rock Retriever contest had a team build a vehicle which had to pick up a rock. This seems easy until you add three 4x4 pieces of wood that the vehicle had to go over. It then had to pick up the rock and bring it back across the area and place it on a circular target. The closer to the center the lower the score you had. The score was based on...

1. Time it took to complete

2. Weight of the vehicle

3. Accurately dropping the rock off

4. Parking the way you started

One of my friends from Pierre was also on my team, Heath Hoftiezer. It took us quite a while to actually get started on building our vehicle, but during the last two or three days we had, we managed to get a respectable vehicle together.

At the contest, we were the third team to go. We finished the course, the first to accomplish that. Every one had to do two runs. On our second run, when we went to go over the 4x4, the wood tore our tape that we had to hold the batteries on. That was it. You could not fix any problems during the competition.

As we watched the rest of the vehicles, no one could finish the course even once. Our chances were looking better and better at getting third place--$40 prize money! Eventually, we moved up to second place because no one had finished. Then one team did finish it quicker than we did. They got first, and we got second--$60 Not bad for expecting 6th or 7th place.