Week 7

Well it has certainly been a long and eventful three weeks and I have a lot to catch up on. I’ll post three posts here to break it apart but I hope you get a chance to read them all. I also have plenty of pictures that need to be posted as well and they’ll be coming soon as well. As for where I left off, it was week 7 in Australia and quickly approaching our mid-semester break. On Monday the 15th of September I went to the student employment office here at Swinburne to inquire about doing an internship once my studies had ended in December. They told me there would be a lot of competition since there is a similar program here to the co-op program at Northeastern called an IBL (Industry Based Learning) which is offered to science and engineering majors here at Swinburne. As an international student due to government laws I am not eligible to participate in this so they informed me that my best chance would be to find an employer with an office back in the US and to contact them. From that point until now I have done a little research and found a company with offices throughout Australia as well as in Boston and other offices around the US. I also informed my co-op advisor of this who told me to contact them as well as contact the international co-op advisor to see if they knew of anything here as well.

Tuesday morning Keian, Brett and I watched Monday Night Football in the morning (the game started at 10:30 am) between the Dallas Cowboys and Philadelphia Eagles. The game was close but in the end the Cowboys won know none of us were rooting for. That afternoon I did some homework and studying as I had a big week ahead of me. In the evening a group of us went to St. Kilda to relax and have the ten dollar steak special dinner. Wednesday I didn’t have my Geomechanics class because our professor had a workshop all week so my only class of the day was Fluid Mechanics in the afternoon. We learned new equations which describe the momentum analysis of flow systems in such cases as water powering a sprinkler. That night I worked more on a paper and presentation I had due the following day for History of Ideas. The topic of each was the same, and asked “The 19th and 20th centuries have been committed to progress. In regard to this commitment to progress, would you say that the Radical Enlightenment has been more triumphant, or the Moderate Enlightenment? Why?” My argument was for the Radical Enlightenment but as it is an opinionated question either could be argued.

During the lecture in History of Ideas on Thursday, we learned about social Darwinism which claims evolution implies morality, economic and social policies as well as believing in the “survival of the fittest”. After the lecture I gave my presentation in the tutorial followed by two other people who presented on different topics. That night Brett and I went to Max’s who was with some of his friends and we hung out there for a little while before going to the Hawthorn for a few drinks. With my Geomechanics professor still gone and having finished the lab for the week my only class on Friday was in Fluid Mechanics where we spent an hour going over example problems which had to do with the lecture on Wednesday. The end of the class marked the beginning to my mid-semester break. Brett and I went out and got sushi for lunch then went back and watched Casino Royale. That night there was a birthday party for Tim who lives in our building that Brett, Mary-Beth, Julie and bunch of other people attended.

On Saturday Brett and I went with our friend Steve and a guy they call Brit (because he’s British) to Lorne to meet up with Max and some of his friends at his beach house. Lorne is about a two hour drive southwest of Hawthorn right on the ocean and is part of the Great Ocean Road which is a long set of highway which runs next to the coast of the ocean and is beautiful. We stayed there for the night and Brett and I went back the next day with Gary and Dale who both live in Unilodge as well. We stopped by Gary’s house on the way back and we had lunch and met his parents and found out his mom is originally from Connecticut. From there we took a train back into the city and then from there another one back home.

Monday I spent the day preparing for our trip to Cairns. I went out and bought a duffle bag to take on the trip as all I had for luggage were my two huge suitcases I came with. Once we were all ready to go, Brett, Mary-Beth, Julie, Mallory and I met up and took a train into the city where we got a bus to take us to the airport. Security at the airport seemed very relaxed compared to what I’m used to in American airports. At the check-in desk we didn’t check any bags through and they didn’t weigh our carry-on’s to see if they were too heavy. At the security checkpoint we didn’t have to take our shoes off and we were allowed to bring more liquid bottles on board (I was able to bring all my shampoo, body wash and other toiletries). We didn’t have to wait around the airport too long before we started boarding our flight, which was nice, and left on our 9:25 pm flight to Cairns.