The Final Print

It is done! This morning I submitted my hard-copy, final prints of my Undergraduate thesis. It took me quite a while to write, but this culmination of nearly five years schooling is finally finished, printed out into a rather sexy looking document and submitted to the faculty for review. I had to get it printed in duplicate, one for the primary marker and one for the secondary marker:

Picture of final print of my Undergradute Thesis.

I was rather taken aback when I picked it up from the printing place — seeing “103 pages” on a computer screen doesn’t have quite the same impact as actually holding two (small) telephone book sized documents in your hands:

Picture of final print of my Undergradute Thesis.

But the LaTeX typesetting looks oh-so-good. Definitely glad I went with that over the old Microsoft Word staple, although frankly it’ll be hard to go back. Perhaps I should just start using LaTeX for everything from now on. That’s it now – one formal presentation in a week’s time, and I’ll have my double degree. An electronic copy of the thesis document and associated source code and host application is now available on the ExplorerBot Project Page.

 

Comments: 8

Leave a reply »

 
 
 

Good to know that most big companies stick to the Microsoft Office suite then (-;

Congrats on finalizing your thesis, when are the cool demo videos coming out?

 

Congrats Dean.

Just to prove yet again how pedantic I am, check the spelling of your “ridgid” on page 1.

Still reading it 😆

Cheers,

Ross
ps … don’t forget to treat your parents to a great meal before you escape to the northern “climes”.

 

Uh oh. I did run it through a spell checker before printing, but it was stuck an American English dictionary. With any luck, the professors will be concentrating on the actual content rather than nit-picking over the spelling…

– Dean

 

Microsoft Office is still easier for WYSIWYG quick editing of documents, but I do wish things like Appnotes and Datasheets were produced from LaTeX source – much easier to read, looks more professional, and you can re-style it according to the desired output medium and the company’s preferences of the month.

There’s a pair of quick and somewhat old demo videos on the ExplorerBot project page where I drive it around, but I’ll take a better one before I finish up for good at Uni showing the live wireless sensor streaming and novelty horn. I actually don’t have the robot at the moment, as it’s being paraded by my lecturer at a few local high-schools to try to drum up interest in engineering once again. Apparently there being no engineering jobs has made people not want to study to become engineers, which is a bit sad.

– Dean

 

Quite a nice looking thesis there, congratulations. I recently submitted mine a few weeks ago and have learned to love latex. Trying to format all my graphs and tables in Word would have been an exercise in frustration.

Odd that there wouldn’t be jobs for engineers, but then again, I live in Perth where the mining industry is gigantic. Although engineering intake is still fairly low, it has more to do with the difficulty of the course and the entrance requirements here.

 

I’ve been hearing both sides of the story here; University professors are saying that there are thousands of high-paid jobs just waiting for engineers, while other people actually looking for jobs say there isn’t much out there. I actually don’t really know the job landscape here, since Atmel poached me before I had a chance to look, but I suppose one day I’ll have to find out when I eventually come back. With any luck there will indeed be jobs waiting by then.

Despite being only one presentation away from being certified, I still feel like I hardly know anything, and that even the little I’ve learned is quickly being forgotten. Is this how everyone feels when they get out of Uni?

– Dean

 

This is more or less how I feel. The place I did my work experience at was a refinery owned by one of the large mining companies. I got a call from my supervisor a few days before I started working who mentioned that he went to my university and that they didn’t teach him shit (in those words exactly).

On the subject of job-hunting, there’s a need for experienced, skilled engineers. The market for fresh graduates is far smaller. I think this is the fine-print about engineering (and indeed any profession) that nobody reads.

 

It all began with the change to Australian government policy about hiring graduate engineers. It used to be that grads could be hired by PMG aka Telecom aka Telstra, SECV and others who would then round out their “education” aka teach them to be real engineers.

They now expect private industry to do that. I learned more in 9 months about being an engineer with my government employer (100 years ago) than all the time at uni. This government policy/attitude is damaging the country in the long run.

Stepping off the soapbox now…

 

Leave a Reply

 
(will not be published)
 
 
Comment
 
 

 

Vital Stats

  • 35 Years Old
  • Australian
  • Lover of embedded systems
  • Firmware engineer
  • Self-Proclaimed Geek

Latest Blog Posts

RSS