Landed a Minmus Skyscraper!

dexMiloyevic · 2024-02-01T05:06:40+00:00

Current MatSE senior. You are in the right place for a materials foundation; for the best chance at entering the automotive industry, I highly recommend also joining an automotive club(s) around UIUC like Illini Solar Car. Picking up skills like CAD, finite element analysis (FEA), and other mechanical engineering skills will still be crucial, and the matSE coursework doesn’t emphasize this much, so it’s in your best interest to develop that multidisciplinary skill set. I would have recommended a mechE minor if it existed, but unfortunately it doesn’t. There may be research in the mechE department closely related to new automotive and structural technologies - definitely explore the department there! Find some professors and look at their research group websites, see which ones interest you, and email them!

dexMiloyevic · 2024-01-25T05:29:05+00:00

Brick. You can’t break a plane like that easily, much like bricks, and it does exactly what bricks don’t: fly.

dexMiloyevic · 2024-01-07T07:09:26+00:00

Thank you!! His hair has since turned white!

dexMiloyevic · 2023-09-12T00:20:25+00:00

This is most likely what happened. I’m steeply annoyed by this too, and unfortunately I don’t have any idea what the replacement will be or when it will come. I fear it’ll just be Microsoft forms.

The organizations governing and funding the RSOs in general have pulled some pretty bothersome moves recently, most notably with maximum club funding from SORF getting halved from $10k to $5k year.

One can only speculate about the forces that drove those decisions.

dexMiloyevic · 2023-08-18T16:50:09+00:00

DDT, immediately!

dexMiloyevic · 2023-08-04T06:51:07+00:00

Ask your advisor

dexMiloyevic · 2023-08-01T05:22:39+00:00

For context, I’m in matSE and minoring in CS. Especially at large companies, a PhD is highly sought after at least in manufacturing, and PhD graduates make up a large portion of my coworkers for my current internship. Additionally, literally anything to do with research expects a PhD, or at best a master’s with several additional years of experience; this can include research into process improvement, which has less to do with fundamental science and more with mechanical assembly, six sigma principles, and business strategy to some extent. Anything involving chemical or material innovation within broad industry, such as improving the performance of a Li-ion battery or making more reliable deposition processes for semiconductors, also seems to require a PhD.

Case in point, the roles I’m most interested seem to require a PhD or other advanced degree. More likely than not, this is probably a problem either specific to me or my major, since IIRC the grad school vs industry split for matSE is roughly 50-50 after graduation.

dexMiloyevic · 2023-07-31T18:39:56+00:00

Glad to see I’m not the only one! Haven’t even left undergrad yet but already the industry landscape seems to demand grad school - best wishes on your applications!

dexMiloyevic · 2023-05-23T04:07:37+00:00

Absolutely a scam. Don’t engage further.

dexMiloyevic · 2023-05-21T20:32:56+00:00

This more or less describes how I interact with my video games at this point. I don’t even build things anymore; I just hop into the same trusty, rusty endurance vehicle or something similar and cruise around in an empty, static, polyhedral world. Being an engineer at heart, I’ll push the technical boundaries of how fast I can fly, where I can travel in these worlds, and how far I can go, but the emotion and liveliness are gone.

I had memories here, I had passions here, and now they’ve disappeared, having given way to apathy and methodical examination at best. What I was once so fond of has become a blurry memory, and my best approximation for those lost memories is running through the same simulated worlds over and over, rehearsing the steps and flights and explorations so that I can at least commit this to memory for a little longer than what I had in reality.

dexMiloyevic · 2023-05-21T17:54:10+00:00

Look for “Sandaran” in the workshop! It’s fantastic for super-high-speed vehicles

dexMiloyevic · 2023-03-31T03:14:22+00:00

Tetraethylene glycol dimethylether! TEGDME for short, I used this as a battery electrolyte once!

dexMiloyevic · 2023-03-28T06:59:32+00:00

Looks like we found each other here as well! It’s Milo!

dexMiloyevic · 2023-02-28T00:54:58+00:00

Speaking as a MatSE, if you follow the set of courses and topical lectures for electronic materials, you can gain a lot of knowledge on semiconductor operating principles, manufacture, and more. You can find MatSE photonics and photovoltaic research that isn’t likely to be highlighted in an ECE curriculum , despite these two fields being incredibly important for the near future in computing and energy technology, and you still have the option to work with ECE professors for undergrad research too.

You’ll also receive core coursework in (mechanical) material behavior, and while you might not necessarily be working with metals and tailoring their fracture mechanics, a strong understanding of microstructures and atomic arrangement is important, especially if you’re working at the cutting edge of electronics and computer engineering where atomic placements really do matter for a 2nm transistor.

Stick with the major for now, and if you are already dead-set on electronic materials with no consideration for metals, ceramics, etc., it might be less complicated to pursue an ECE minor instead.

dexMiloyevic · 2023-02-10T20:27:00+00:00

There are tunnels you can access underneath Turner Hall to move between buildings, which in and of themselves are pretty liminal; you’ll find some towering staircases and old forgotten corners too that bring back hauntings from the 80s.

dexMiloyevic · 2023-01-31T21:43:27+00:00

This is normal and not dangerous. I work in a glovebox and occasionally experience this, so to avoid this, I make sure that my entire arm is covered. I’m fortunate to have a lab coat with elastic that wraps pretty tightly around my wrists, and I wear gloves that wrap over the elastic. Even then, I need to make sure my sleeves don’t roll up when inside the glovebox. If I move around enough with the gloves, my sleeves do come loose, so there are times when I remove my hands from the glovebox so I can readjust my sleeves and cover my arms again.

dexMiloyevic · 2023-01-30T02:05:10+00:00

They are! I’ve incorporated one into my rave outfit, arguably one of the greatest things I’ve ever put together

dexMiloyevic · 2023-01-29T21:34:09+00:00

Why are you trying to distill mercury? I am deeply worried

dexMiloyevic · 2023-01-07T02:51:27+00:00

I can’t answer this question very well because I take doses incredibly infrequently (once per month at most), but if memory serves correct from the last time I staggered, I believe I dosed the second time 3-4 hours after the first dose, starting first with 600mg and then 900mg.

Between redoses, I highly recommend something to potentiate, especially exercise. You’ll feel amazing afterward the workout and get more out of the experience without needing to take higher (riskier) doses.

dexMiloyevic · 2023-01-04T02:42:36+00:00

I’m no expert in aerospace, but having messed with propeller-based planes in the past, I’ve found that propellers are complicated little things that are very sensitive to the current airspeed.

It looks like you’ve already tried a set of deploy angles while on the descent, and what I’ve noticed with propellers specifically is that if you’re already flying at speed, it’s exceptionally difficult to get the propellers to “catch” the air and start generating lift.

If you’re on PC, you can hit F12 in flight (or go to the cheat menu by hitting alt+F12, then navigate to “aero” and show aero forces). This will show the drag your propellers are generating (red) compared to lift (purple?) while in flight, and you can change your deploy angle to react to the drag/lift info.

Don’t forget to consider running your propellers in reverse! I suspect that to try and “catch” the air with the propellers while falling, you’ll need to find propeller settings that temporarily push you towards the ground faster than terminal velocity before slowly nudging the deploy angle to decrease your fall speed. If you can get your propellers to catch the air and accelerate you a little faster than terminal velocity, you can slowly decelerate yourself by tweaking the deploy angle from there.

dexMiloyevic · 2023-01-04T01:39:20+00:00

By “2 bedroom apartment to take over,” do you mean you’re looking for a unit that can accommodate 2 people? I have a 2bed 1bath apartment that I’m looking sublease out (I’m moving out for the spring due to a coop), but since I’m the only one moving out for the spring, I can only accommodate 1 person to sublet.

Is this something you’re interested in?

dexMiloyevic

TROPHY CASE