What a week to begin

I would hope that I will update this blog at least every other day, if not every day... but I've already been humbled. It seems this week was not a good week to start my blog because free time has been few and far between. My graduate classes in this sustainability program have reached their 7th week and the assignments are piling up. I've had one major assignment due every day this week so far and it will continue that way through Friday.

First, I finalized my Plan of Study and had it approved by my degree adviser. It took some time to figure out every class I want to take during my two year program, but I've done it. It's not completely written in stone, so I may change a course in the spring quarter, we will see. The potential hiccup in my plans was having to get one of my chosen courses approved. But this turned out to be successful. This was a natural resources economics course for this winter quarter. I'll also be taking a course on life cycle assessment of products and processes and a lab course about rapid prototyping, also known as 3-D printing to some. My spring quarter will have a design for the environment course, a design for manufacture course, and solid & hazardous waste management course. I'm pretty excited about the prospects.

This quarter I'm taking a product design course, a fundamentals of sustainability course, and a renewable energy systems course. Tuesday was the deadline for a costing & assembly time analysis for a window fan product. Today, a short report and presentation on aluminum production and recycling processes is due. Still have a little bit of rehearsal to do for the presentation. Thursday, a homework on solar photovoltaic systems is due. And Friday, a proposal paper for numerically modeling a seasonal solar thermal collector system is due. So a busy week to begin this blogging project, but it's already proving to be quite enjoyable so I will keep it up.