Homework

Phew! I finished my first homework assignment which will be graded. It was a lot of work and, as I said before, I had a panic attack about it; but it's done and not too shabbily. The problem was to find optimal solutions and I did not succeed in finding the optimum in either homework problem, but my algorithms are correct and I think that is the real goal. I do have a few more days for tweaking if other studying doesn't get in the way.

As soon as my washing machine is finished with this load, I'm going to Bed, Bath and Beyond to get some coffee. Before I left New Orleans last weekend I ordered a Keurig single cup coffee maker. It is great! I've already finished all of the K-cups that came with it--varieties of flavors and brands. I had forgotten how much fun it is to try different coffee. I've had bold brews from several different countries, light and medium brews, and vanilla and hazelnut flavored brews. All that I've tried have been good--some better than others, but all enjoyable. If any of you decide you want one of these coffee makers, let me know--I get free K-cups if I refer you.

I decided it would be cathartic (as is this blog) to list what I miss most about my previous existence. I think it will help me to "remember when to come home." Thanks for the comments some of you have left. It's good to know that you're sharing in my adventure. No new birds today--I have two pesky squirrels who are eating all of the seeds!

Drippy Saturday

It's a drippy Saturday and I'm trying to write Java code for Adaptive Optimization class, but I'm so distracted by all of the birds outside my window I'm having a terrible time concentrating. It is really amazing. I decided to put up the "outside my window" list to keep track of them and those are the birds I've already seen this morning! I can hear others that I've never heard before, but they must be high in the trees. I'll add to the list as I see them. What a great spot for a birder!

My classes are really moving now. I had a minor panic attack this week over homework in Adaptive Optimization, but I had a nice visit with the teacher yesterday and feel much better today. I was very close to changing my status to "audit" for the class so that my poor performance would not be reflected in my grade. She convinced me that I would not perform poorly; we'll see...

When I was a student before we programmed in Fortran because that's all there was. Now there are a myriad of choices, but all of them come with issues. I'm alternating between Java and Matlab, both of which I've taught myself this week on top of reading and doing homework. I love school!

TALONS

Thanks to Allan, I had a wonderful weekend in New Orleans--spent quality time with my husband, saw lots of friends, ran in the park, ate too much too many times and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I listened to the first half of the Saints game on the road and watched the last half in my la-Z-boy chair. And proudly wore my Saints shirt all day today.

Got to campus early so that I could make up the weekend time I didn't study, but the best laid plans...Lu Ann (she is the supervisor for my assistantship) came rushing into my office about 9:30 and asked me to go with her to a TALONS meeting this morning and then to take her place at the meeting the next two Fridays. TALONS stands for "Talented Academic Leaders Outstanding National Scholars." It is part of Auburn Engineering's recruitment effort. We have a display and brochures on a table and we talk informally about Industrial and Systems Engineering to academically talented kids (and their families) who are considering Auburn. Each of the engineering disciplines is represented, usually by the department's academic advisor. Lu Ann is ISE's academic advisor. There were three groups with about 15 kids per group. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and look forward to doing it again. The rest of the day I worked linear programming problems to prepare for class tomorrow.

My bird feeder is a hit! This morning I had a brown thrasher, a cardinal, and a bluejay on the feeder at the same time! I have a recording of a brown thrasher I heard in Opine and it is the most beautiful song. Thrashers are in the same family as the mockingbird so they mimic other birds, but they typically repeat a particular song one or two times as opposed to the mockingbird's three to five times. When they're singing, they are often at the top of a small bush or tree and I think their voices are prettier than mockingbirds.

Morning Run

A crisp clear 37 degree morning--perfect for running. I actually ran the entire 3 miles, both uphill and downhill except for the final 45 degree hill. That's where I began my cool down-ha! The cardinal is the early bird--usually the first to be heard if you're outside--and cardinals don't even eat worms, only seeds. I love starting my run before the sun comes up. Can't see the actually sunrise here, but the birds know as soon as it hits the horizon and that's when they begin their day.

Today is garbage day on my street. The City of Auburn website says to have your city-issued container out before 6 a.m. and removed from the curb by 6 p.m. The truck begins its tour at 6 a.m. and they have the trucks that are automated. The driver stays in the truck, pulls up alongside the container and a robotic arm reaches out, picks up the container, dumps the garbage in the truck and sets the container back on the ground. It is relatively quiet--no one is yelling or whistling anyway--and very efficient. Garbage doesn't fall out all over the street. Only one worker instead of three. Unfortunately I know why New Orleans doesn't do this. Cars parked on the narrow streets impede the ability of the trucks to get to the containers. Oh well! By the way, my container has been emptied and I've already removed it from the curb. They also do curbside recycling, but I'm not doing that yet--not much room and no container.

Studying and a movie

After studying the entire long weekend, I treated myself to a movie this evening. I saw It's Complicated. I always enjoy anything that Meryl Streep plays in--she is such a wonderful actress. I watched her accept her Golden Globe for Julie & Julia last night and her speech was perfect. The movie theater is 5 minutes away from my house and they have student night on Tuesdays ($6.50 with a student ID and both popcorn and drinks are only $1.) That's quite different than the regular price so any movies I go see will be on Tuesdays from now on.

Everything I've read this weekend seems to be in a foreign language--Economics is in Accounting and I've always thought Accounting was foreign. It is so illogical to me. And the other two courses are in Greek. I don't see anything on this blog to allow special character inserts so I'll spell it out--lambdas, thetas, mus, alphas, betas, deltas, epsilons, and some I'm not sure of because they are small Greek letters I don't even remember! Everything has at least one subscript or some superscript notation and capital letters mean something different from lowercase letters, bold letters mean something different from those in a regular font. It is familiar, but only vaguely. I wonder how long it will take for it to really make sense again...

I have my first homework assignment: "For the two problems described below, code a simple Simulated Annealing to solve the problems. To do this you need to encode the problem, develop the definition of a neighborhood, define a move operator, select an annealing schedule and select a stopping criterion." And here is problem 1: "Fifteen departments are to be placed in 15 locations with 5 departments (columns) in three rows. The objective is to minimize flow costs between the placed departments. The flow cost is (flow * distance), where both flow and distance are symmetric between any given pair of departments. Below is the flow (lower half) between departments and rectilinear distance (upper half) between locations matrix. The optimal solution is 575 (or 1150 if you double the flows). " Unfortunately this sounds a lot like Greek to me too and I know that all of the words are English. Luckily I have until February 4 to have this completed. I'm hoping that in the next few days when the topic of the lecture is Simulated Annealing much of what I've been reading will become more clear.

Go Saints!

This is when I really miss New Orleans!

End of the first week of class

The bird of the day is the brown-headed nuthatch. I saw several of them on my ride to class this morning. Usually I hear them before I see them. They sound like rubber ducks and they're often in the tops of pine trees. We had a pair build a nest in a dead tree in Poplarville.

I spent the day working on my assistantship project. Wes is my co-worker and we've organized both the office and the files. I think we will work well together. He is from North Carolina and is new to Industrial Engineering. He wants to be a project manager for an electronics plant, thus his interest in I.E. His girlfriend is a PhD candidate in Psychology here at Auburn. We have a lot of work to do for the accreditation self study, but we're off to a good start.

Speaking of offices, in ISE graduate school, the department provides a work space (desk and chair) for each grad student. There are 4 or 5 rooms with desks in them and each student is given a key to a desk. Because our ABET project needs its own private space, Wes and I will share a meeting room dedicated to our project and we'll each have a computer along with our desk and chair. I think that will be much better than being in a room with 15 or 20 others.

My second day of class, Thursday, was better than my first. I have read all that I'm supposed to read and could easily follow the discussion in all three classes. I have not had homework yet and am a bit worried about remembering how to solve problems, but at least English is my first language--not so for the majority of the students. Wes said not to worry in the Econ class, it is just a lot of memorization. Obviously, he is not 58 years old!

For some reason, I think it is important to record the low temperature for the day. My grandmother always wrote the daily high and low temperature on a calendar. Maybe that's why I'm doing it. Anyway, it was 28 at sunrise this morning and 30 when I rode my bike to class--still needed bundling. But on the way home, it was in the low 50's. All in all, a beautiful day!

Brandon gave me directions to the bar where he watched Saints games. I'm just not sure I can stroll in by myself and feel part of the scene. I may end up watching the game with Coma here in my house. I'll see how brave I feel at 3:00 or so. Watch for Allan and Brandon--they'll be in that number at the Superdome!

Wednesday

To keep from getting frostbite, I waited until 7:00 to run this morning. The temperature was up to 24 by then. It was a good uphill and downhill 3-mile run/walk in the same beautiful neighborhood that I ride through to class. I walked up hills and ran down hills and on the flats. It may take awhile for me to get to the point that I can run the whole way, but I'm up for it.

I spent the majority of the day reading and working problems with a mid-day break to go to Kroger, the grocery store. The economics text is actually very well written and I just may learn some accounting and economics because of that. I am having trouble with the linear programming problems. There are no solutions in the book and I have no confidence that I'm formulating them correctly. I never was very good at "word" problems, but I'm persevering.

Apparently word is out to the 4-legged community that I'm here. A young tabby cat showed up outside my door this afternoon, purring and rubbing against me--quite affectionate. No, I didn't bring her/him inside--wasn't sure how Coma would react.

First Day of Class

Alagasco turned on the gas and lit the pilot light on both the furnace--the gas guy said it is really just a big space heater in the center of the little house--and the stove. So, I've turned off the small space heaters and it is comfortably warm inside now.

I bundled up and rode my bike to class. The route I'm taking is through rolling hills in an older and very nice neighborhood with established trees and creeks with rocks in them. I saw a red headed woodpecker this morning--an incredibly beautiful bird. It took me about 20 minutes to get to class and it was uphill most of the way. The good part of that is that it's downhill on the ride home. Biking is so much easier than driving and trying to find a place to park.

It turns out that all of my classes are in the same room, Shelby 1120--boring, but easy. Shelby 1120 is a very smart classroom. The instructor wears a lapel microphone and has a station from which he/she lectures with a computer, Internet and school network access and an overhead projector. There's a a 10 foot square built-in monitor in the front of the room. And, it is the classroom in Shelby Center which has cameras for outreach education. In a control room next door someone manages the 4 or 5 cameras and films the lectures.

All of my classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My 9:30 class is Linear Programming. More than half of the 55 students in the full classroom are foreign-born and there are only 10 females. I like Dr. Bulfin's demeanor. Here's one of his quotes, "If you can't work the problems before class, don't worry; but if you can't work the problems after class, worry." He explained that linear programming has nothing to do with computer programming and introduced us to George Dantzig, the father of linear programming. I expect the course to be difficult and require me to re-discover all of those higher level thinking skills.

At 1:30 I take Adaptive Optimization from Dr. Alice Smith, the department chair. In this class there are 14 people present and 1 in outreach--9 of these are Phd candidates, 1 is post-doctoral, and the other 4 are Masters candidates. It was interesting to see when we went around the room and introduced ourselves that 7 are from Turkey, 1 from Korea, 1 from Zimbabwe, 1 from China and 4 from the USA. The class is a survey of optimization methods inspired by nature and will include Simulated Annealing, Genetic Algorithms, Tabu Search, Ant Colony Methods, and Particle Swarm Optimization. I'm expecting this to be my favorite class.

And, finally at 3:00 I have Engineering Economics. There are 55 people in this class. Since this is a core class for engineering masters programs, there are more young American students than in linear programming. The course is just what it says, an economics course for aspiring engineers. Professor Park wrote the book and lectures directly from it.

All engineering grad students have an office, but I don't have a key yet, so I spent my free time today in common areas checking email and doing some reading. I'm tired tonight, but will spend most of tomorrow studying and preparing for Thursday.

Life continues at home

While I spent the weekend taking an on-line course in linear algebra, Allan spent the weekend at our farm in Mississippi and sent a photo of our newest addition. Mother and baby are cold, but well. The Dexter/Zebu cow came to us from The Zoo in Pensacola and this is her first calf. I hope to see them soon!

Cold weather

This morning I awoke to a wren singing his beautiful lilting song and a clear 18 degree morning. I did not go out to run, but I did take Coma for a brief walk. Thank goodness it isn't usually this cold here--part of the arctic front that is all over the United States.

When I arrived late Wednesday the water was not on so Coma and I spent the night at the Days Inn in Opelika--they allow pets. I say we spent the night because I didn't sleep very well. Having a 13 year old 95 lb bloodhound in my room was not conducive to a good night's sleep. We left there early Thursday and came back to our little house and unpacked. I just put everything in piles that didn't fit on the one set of built-in shelves or in the kitchen cabinets. The water people came, the warm and comfortable bed was delivered, Blake--the college student who maintains the property--carried the microwave oven from the car and promised that whatever was broken would be fixed and I picked up essentials from K-Mart and Wal-Mart. But the gas company told me it would be Monday before they would arrive. So, not only is it 18 degrees outside, it is 55 degrees inside and here I sit on my new La-Z-Boy recliner in long underwear, a turtle fur hat and my fleece!

How it all started...

This summer I was in Auburn for Auburn High School's 40th reunion and decided to ask about the possibility of finishing my degree. After several false starts, I walked into Dr. Jeffrey Smith's office. He is the graduate coordinator of the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department. I told him who I was and that I wanted to finish the degree I began 35 years ago. He pointed me to Dr. George Flowers, dean of the Graduate School. I met with Dr. Flowers and after a good visit he said he was willing to work with me if Dr. Smith was also willing. Thus began my adventure.

I had transcripts sent, completed an application, studied for and took the GRE. My GRE scores were disappointing, but sufficient and I was admitted to Auburn's Graduate School in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department for the Spring Semester. Auburn agreed to accept much of my previous work and my course of study stated that I needed to take four courses and complete a project to finish my degree. I enrolled in three courses--Engineering Economics, Linear Programming and Adaptive Optimization and applied for an assistantship.

I have a research assistantship working on the department self study for ADEP accreditation. The assistantship pays tuition and a stipend that will cover my rent and utilities. Classes begin for me on Tuesday; I hope my brain is ready.