Nothing much to report this week, my dear readers. We received our instructions for Project 3 to make our own allocator. Our job is to mimic the heap, though a much simpler version of it. Once again Professor Downing has given us all the tools in class we need to complete the assignment and made sure we understand the requirement exactly.

I was just talking to one of my friends about how nice it is to be passed all the weed-out courses and to have projects that we can fully complete and understand. I know there were some people that probably had an easy time with every project, but my group partners and I always seemed to work for hours and get nowhere. We spent half the time just understanding what the expectations were. On top of that, the estimation to complete these projects was over 40 hours per week.

It’s incredibly refreshing to be assigned projects that are challenging enough that we learn something new, yet are clear and manageable enough that we have a chance, even if we get stuck on a few points, to complete them fully and get the most knowledge out of the experience.

Tip of the week: With the continuation of interviews for internships and summer jobs, it is important for engineers to know how to be confident and negotiate the bottom line. Most of you have probably already seen this already, but just in case you haven’t: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/