Bye St. John's

There is a lot I should write about, so I decided to split my last topics into two posts. This post is about St. John's and school, and the next will be about my little trip to Florida and going back to Finland + some reflection on the exchange semester. In a nutshell, this post is what a Finnish person coming to study in St. John's would most likely want to know before applying.

St. John's and MUN overview

St. John's is a historic and distinctive city in the island of Newfoundland. The population is a little over 100 000, which makes St. John's a really good sized city for my taste. There are lots of hills and colorful houses around the city, that is located on the coast. There is a lot to see and do, especially since the nature is very different from Finland. And the weather could be summarized into two words: windy and unpredictable. It's a bit warmer than Finland, but the weather also changes very quickly. Sometimes it's cold, sometimes it's warm, but usually it's windy and rainy (in Fall). What makes the city different from most Finnish cities (same seems to apply to a lot of North American cities in my experience), is that a lot more people seem to be living in their own houses instead of apartments. Students that don't want to live in on-campus residence often share a house, instead of getting their own apartment or sharing an apartment. There are buses going around the town fairly frequently, so going to a mall for example is easy. Cabs aren't that expensive either, usually sharing a cab between residence and downtown (~3km) costs you just a few dollars.

The university (MUN) is larger than e.g. LUT, and includes multiple disciplines anywhere from music to engineering. Buildings are fairly old, and they are spread apart based on disciplines in a small area. There is a tunnel system connecting most of the buildings, if you don't feel like walking outdoors. I've covered most of the differences between Finnish/LUT and MUN university systems in my previous posts, so I won't go in depth here.

One major difference compared to Finland is that accommodation is effectively guaranteed. If you apply for on-campus residence, you will either get a room in a shared apartment, a single room in dorm style housing or a double-room. Naturally you can also look for your own place in the private market, which is often less expensive. But based on my own experience, I would definitely recommend applying for dormitory style housing in Paton College. It's very easy to get to know to and spend time with people while living in a dorm, since everybody uses the same public spaces, bathrooms and dining hall (that's also used by people from other houses). Also there are lots of events organized for the people living in on-campus residence and people from your house. And for an exchange period it is very convenient and easy, although expensive. Again, I've discussed accommodation in my earlier posts, so I'm keeping it brief here.

Course overviews

I completed four courses while in MUN. A brief summary of each summary below.

ENGL 1020 Writing for Second Language Students consisted of two lessons per week, two quizzes, three writing assignments and a final (an essay). Lessons and quizzes were mostly about grammar and academic text theory. Writing assignments were a summary and two synthesis texts, that you had to revise once or twice after the first draft. The final was just a synthesis that you'd write in class. Overall the course was well organized and instructed, but to be honest, also quite useless if you already have academic writing experience. I learned a few grammatical details and improved as a writer, but that's about it. I wouldn't recommend this course for an exchange student, unless you're feeling unsure about your writing skills, because you would already know almost everything covered in the course.

ENGI 3941 Production Technology had lectures twice a week, a lab session once a week as well as assignments, projects and a final exam. Lectures were good and informational, and in lab sessions you got to make your own air motor, which gives a student a more practical view of some manufacturing methods. Weekly assignments were quizzes about the most current topics, and they consisted of mostly multiple choice questions and a few calculations. Projects were done in groups, and in the first one you had to design a 3D printable object and a quick return mechanism that were later printed/laser cut. In the second one you had to reverse engineer and model an object in SolidWorks, and the third one was a research project about modern production technologies. The final exam consisted solely of open field questions, and there were roughly 50 of them. There was a huge amount of material (~1500 PDF slides and/or a book) to be studied for the exam, and if you wanted a good grade, you'd actually have to study essentially all of it. I had good enough grades from assignments and projects, so I didn't study too hard for the final. This course had a lot of useful information for a (mechanical) engineer and interesting labs, but it also required the most work out of all my courses.

ENGI 9614 Renewable Energy and Resource Conservation had two lectures per week, assignments, an individual project, a midterm exam and a final exam. Lectures were sometimes not concentrated on essential subjects on the course, which made them annoying to attend. Assignments were helpful, either calculations or summaries about course topics. You could choose your own topic for the project, and the topics were usually either case studies or research projects, and you did have to do a short presentation on the subject. Midterm and final were pretty basic, theory questions and calculations. The theory and general topics of this course were fine (see course name), but some of the topics were completely irrelevant and some were way too detailed for an introductory course. Communication between the teacher and students was also an issue if you missed lectures, since the teacher didn't always post important information to the online study platform.

ENGI 9627 Environmental Systems Engineering consisted of weekly lectures, a midterm exam, assignments and a project. The main topic of this course was basically different optimization methods for system/operation design, and not necessarily systems engineering as a whole. Lectures were useful, but sometimes hard to follow. Couple of the assignments were calculation based question collections, and one was a critical review of an article. Midterm exam consisted only of calculations, and essentially included everything taught in the course apart from the last couple lectures. Project was a research or case study term paper, that included a presentation. This was done in pairs, and you could choose your own topic. For me the contents of this course will be useful in the future (at least hopefully). Again, one of the main issues of this course was the communication between students and the teacher. If you missed a lecture (like I did a few times), you would miss a lot of important stuff. For example, that there's an assignment due next week, which I learned when there were ~24h left to do it (originally there was a week), because the teacher didn't announce the assignment anywhere but the lecture that I had missed. This meant having to cram up a whole lot of calculations in a short period of time, based on incomplete material. This was the second major issue, the teacher didn't upload any of the calculation examples online, which meant that you had to be in the lecture, get the example notes from someone else or take a picture of the teacher's notebook during the next lecture. In terms of the aforementioned assignment, this meant that I had to do a lot of calculations that were based on the lecture examples that were not available anywhere on such short notice (Google is a friend though, even if relevant examples were really hard to find since the subject was quite complex). I did ask later if the teacher could upload the lecture examples online, but the answer was no since apparently it's "not fair for the people that attended all the lectures". Apart from these issues, the course is still useful for someone in my field.



A second post is coming up whenever I'm finished writing it. Could be a day or two weeks.

-Aapo

Had a little snowball fight when the snow finally stayed on the ground longer than a couple of hours.

"Genius is making complex ideas simple, not making simple ideas complex" -Albert Einstein. Always wondered why these (the one on the left) had to be so unnecessarily complex (compare to the one on the right).

Bye CU-311. A typical double-room in dorms. At first I had a roommate here, but most of the time I had the whole room to myself.