Author Archive

Tuesdays with Professor Collins

Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
A hundred or so frosh line the seats of the well-known “Blue (now beige) Room” in the Sandford Fleming Building. It’s our first day as Engineering Science students, and CIV102 is the one course that will teach us what most of us always envisioned engineering to be – designing buildings and infrastructure.

Professor Michael P. Collins takes his post up at the front of the classroom, and starts off on a story about the legacy and ingenuity of Roman engineers. He continues with yet another tangent about the anthropological significance of using a metre stick as a lecturer, one of his trademark tools. He finally lists the three fundamental principles of engineering, being:

  1. You can’t push on a rope.
  2. F = ma
  3. To get the answer, you must know the answer.

It is this kind of casual storytelling, mixed with amusing proverbs and calmly-delivered jokes, that has allowed him to win the hearts of many an EngSci. And from the bridge-designing projects (one of which is actually built and tested in a class competition), to the admittedly cute Clairefontaine notebooks each student is required to take notes in, to the standard ultra-confusing problem sets, CIV102 is as memorable a course as they come.

One need not look very far to see students’ respect for Collins. Be it rave reviews on professor-rating websites, or a Facebook page entirely devoted to the worship of the professor (complete with a long list of quotations), everyone has something to say about his quirks and entertaining lectures. Ask any EngSci whom their favourite professor has been, and many will cite Collins.

Fast-forward to the last day of lectures in the fall semester. Once again, sitting in the “Blue Room”, a group of upper-year students accompanies the usual first-year crowd to hear Collins’ final lecture. He discusses the legacy that all engineers have brought forth on us, and the power to create but also destroy that is within our hands. It’s a solemn conclusion, but it leaves his pupils with the same kind of lasting impression as the structures past engineers have left our civilization with.

Posted in On Campus, UT Life | 1 Comment »

Extra-curriculars in My First Semester (or Lack Thereof)

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Just three weeks before the end of the fall semester, I have come to the realization that I haven’t done any productive work outside of school since the start of classes.

As a first-year student, I naturally had many plans to do extra-curricular activities over the summer. French Club. The Varsity newspaper. Engineering Toastmasters. Engineers Without Borders. The Blue & Gold Committee (a spirit group for engineers). The Engineering Society, Academic Committee. The Engineering LEGO Club.

Tons of plans, but they’ve fallen through due to:

  1. Time commitments. Toastmasters ends at 10pm on Thursdays, when I am often staying up late completing PHY180 lab write-ups. I also have limited time to begin with because the commute eats up 3 hours each day. LEGO Club… well, meetings are also on Thursdays, and I guess doing error analysis calculations is more feasible than constructing a house made of LEGO bricks.
  2. Lack of response from group executives. I’m serious – I signed up for a gazillion clubs during the UTSU and Engineering Clubs’ Fairs, but have only been e-mailed by a handful. And some have only e-mailed once, and never again. The only French Club meeting I’ve been to was their introductory brunch, which, incidentally, was delicious.
  3. Laziness. I signed up for blogUT, knew I was going to blog the second I had something to say, and… kind of forgot about it.
  4. In my defence, it was partly also due to shyness and decision-making. I was trying to come up with something interesting to talk about. Whatever was remotely related to engineering, I stuck the blog entry into the Online Design Journal I’m required to keep in preparation for one of my final exams.

Considering that all of my friends here at U of T are first-years in engineering, I haven’t been doing non-scientifically-related writing for a while now, and I am slowly losing my French skills, my inactivity is clearly something I should deal with.

Fortunately, I kept the last e-mail I got from blogUT, in my Inbox where I could easily see it. And I discovered that not only was the founder a former EngSci graduate, but there were posts, personal ones (i.e. not just artsy reviews or school events!) that could resemble what I’d write in any blog.

I decided not to write for the Arts section of the Varsity when I realized that they didn’t publish book reviews (plus my  reviews are generally outdated – a few months after the book’s release), and didn’t write for the Science section because they seem to expect up-to-date news from research conducted right at the U of T. The Cannon, the engineering newspaper, has never e-mailed me since I wrote my contact information on the sign-up sheet.

So much for trying to be connected to student life. I guess that’s how blogUT started, because it sure feels good to be blogging and just… doing something aside from problem sets and whatnot.

Posted in Clubs, Survival Tips, We've Got Issues | 2 Comments »