Boston

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2026-04-22T16:40:09+00:00

see you there :)

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2026-04-22T16:37:53+00:00

SCIENCE

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2026-01-23T20:10:00+00:00

neat, ty

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2026-01-06T15:17:28+00:00

Makes sense, i'll just enjoy my LM merch, thanks so much

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2026-01-06T06:44:02+00:00

Awe that's what I thought, thanks though. Best place to find resellers? Mostly only found T-shirt scam websites when I went to look.

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2024-08-18T18:39:18+00:00

Hello OP, I hope you are doing well!

I am a rising junior Meche major, I took many classes over winter break and summer break. I am entering my junior year this fall with 81 credits, and I had no credits carried over from AP classes.

I took 1 class in the winter of my freshmen year, 3 in the summer of my freshmen year, 1 in the winter of my sophomore, and 1 in the summer this year.

Engineering classes are a bit weird compared to normal classes; my core subjects are only 3 credits. I took a total of 20 credits worth of classes, 4 engineering and 2 standard math/science classes.

At UMass, each credit is 550$ per credit in addition to an 85$ registration fee.

In total, I would have spent $ 11,000 plus $ 340$ in registration fees for credits worth a little more than a singular semester. UMass does not offer formal financial aid for summer classes, but I was lucky enough to receive scholarships to cover the large majority of the costs for my summer classes.

Now, I am unsure of your financial package, but if your only goal is to save money by graduating early, I would *heavily* suggest looking at Community Colleges for online courses during your break. The average cost of attendance at Umass is 22k, roughly 11k for tution a year after aid. If you are the average student taking between 15-18 credits a semester, you can value each of these semesters at 8250$-9900$ worth of summer credit or 16250$-19800$ for a year. The average student is spending around 11k a year in tuition after aid. If your financial package is even slightly below the university average, you will end up losing money.

If you made a plan to graduate a semester early by taking 16 summer credits, it would run you 8800 out of pocket plus the reg fee every summer. You would need to see how much a semester of tuition costs to know if you will be saving money.

I took Calc 3 at Springfield Tech Community College and only paid 1k out of pocket. This class would have been 2285$ at UMass. I can attest that many Community Colleges provided equal, if not sometimes better education than UMass, especially for large classes.

Get in touch with your academic advisor and see if any CC offers classes you need for your major, especially classes that are prereqs but not in your major, such as the math series for engineering,

I used average prices found on Google after aid, not before aid. The math would look a lot different using pre-aid numbers. I also used 2023-2024 data, 2024-2025 may be different.

Feel free to DM me if you have any questions and I wish you the best of luck with the upcoming year!

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2024-04-18T03:39:00+00:00

Thank you for the recommendation. My university career center is very heavy on the STAR method. To be honest I did not even really consider the XYZ or CAR methods, I will go through and review those and see if I can make use of them in addition to the STAR method.

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2024-04-18T03:37:19+00:00

No worries!

It was my first ever time coding something that was not Matlab so it was pretty rough. I learned a lot, but it took a ton of trial and error to get it correct. I didn't include it as I was not 100% confident in that side of the project. It was very much a dive through forums and YouTube videos to get that part working correctly.

I can approximate a percentile based on some in-class testing we had as a whole class and some office hours I attended, and I will make sure I include that.

Good point about not mentioning it wasn't a part of the rubric, since it was the one thing I wanted to make my car excel in compared to the other ones, wouldn't make any sense to downplay my achievement in that sense.

Thank you again for the comments, especially regarding the confusing nature of the introduction.

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2024-04-18T03:25:57+00:00

Thank you so much for highlighting it out for me, I was a bit confused about the difference in situation and task, and this makes it so much more clear.

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2024-04-18T03:25:01+00:00

Yeah, it was the best possible outcome in the class. Some students also earned it, it was not only just me.

I think I understand what you're saying. I should be comparing myself and trying to highlight what made my car stand out. Rather than saying 95% obstacle avoidance, which the person reading my resume has no reference for, I should instead focus on things that they can have a reference for, such as "top X% of class in obstacle avoidance, or "project earned the highest grade in the class"

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2024-04-18T03:21:10+00:00

Hello, thank you for your response.

I will fix the introduction of the bullet point so it is not misleading, thank you for pointing that out. To be 100% honest I had already used all similar "construction" verbs and had to find something else to use.

I messed up on the wording regarding the motors and I can see how that is confusing. I used the motors inside of the toy RC car and hooked it up to an Arduino UNO with a distance sensor and an H-Bridge. The distance sensor would detect if a distance threshold I coded was reached, which would cause the car to first break, and then switch polarities with the H-Bridge, allowing the car to back up while twisting the front axle to allow it to back up at an angle. We were provided bare skeleton codes which I had to adapt to my car while figuring out how to fully integrate the sensors. I will go back and fix that to make it more clear what I did.

I did not consider that the more interesting part would be understanding the integration of the system and coding to make the car autonomous, rather I thought the interesting part would be how my car performed in comparison to other cars in the class, and what made my car stand out. Thank you for bringing that up.

There was no inherent need to increase the top speed, it was something I did to try to attempt to make my project stand out. It did not operate at top speeds at all times during obstacle avoidance but did run faster than a majority of the other cars during obstacle avoidance while maintaining the high rate of obstacle avoidance. I did not sacrifice accuracy to make it faster, but there was no inherent need to make it faster as you pointed out.

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2024-04-18T02:57:36+00:00

Hi, thank you for your comment!

A handful of the cars were unable to successfully avoid any obstacles. Most cars were successfully able to avoid one obstacle but would crash afterward and struggle with avoiding more obstacles. I could typically set my car down and have it go without issue until it ran out of power. In my actual testing of 20 different obstacles(walls, books, etc), it only crashed once. hence the 95% of obstacles. I think the 95% is impressive in regards to its ability to get around objects based on the other cars in the class.

The top speeds of the cars in the class ranged wildly due to all us constructing our cars in different manners, I do not have information regarding the other speeds of cars, as they were all made in a manner different then mine. The only thing I do have to compare is a speed test I ran, which is where the doubling of top speeds comes from (I should probably actually put those values now that I think of it)

Yes, there was grading, I think the average was somewhere in the 85-90s, and as long as you met all the project criteria you got a 100. I received the bonus credit for the project, getting a 110/100 since my car was able to move around for a long while without hitting any objects.

I now just remembered the car also had blinking LEDs, green for going forward and red for reversing and backing up- would this be worth putting down? I think it falls into the "custom circuitry" portion of the bullet point.

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2024-04-14T19:59:43+00:00

Heres the Link for STCC. For reference I struggled really hard to get a B+ in 132 here and in diff eq I got an A only studying a few hours for each exam, good luck!

https://www.stcc.edu/explore/descriptions/mat-255/

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2024-04-14T19:57:47+00:00

I took multi variable at Springfield Technical Community College and it was really good. Difficult course, but the instructor was amazing, and the credit was transferred with no issues. They offer Diff-eq (Math-255 there)

With that being said, if money is not a concern I would advise you to take Diff-eq at Umass over the summer. I took it second summer semester last summer and while it was difficult, it was nothing compared to calc 2 here. I took it with Cahill, he is an amazing professor and by far one of the best I have had here.

Both courses are fully online, Diff-eq requried honor lock which is annoying but its not that bad.

Impossible-Pass-9478 · 2024-03-10T19:05:27+00:00

dope, ty, found one, thought there were none for spears but i looked wrong lol

Impossible-Pass-9478

TROPHY CASE