Where is sleep in the schedule ?

It has been a crazy week at SDM-MIT. By some calculation average sleep the class got last week was less than 5 hours. Last week we had first lectures in System Architecture, Refresher on Statistic and probability and Human side of technology. SDM is a costly program but it was good to sense the worth in the professors who teach, they are masters of their fields with so many papers and books under their belt and they bring tremendous experience and vision to the class.
So we had lectures 9:00 - 5:00 with assignments and then from 5:30 onwards till night whatever time the group design challenge work was done, we had to steal some time after 5:30 to finish the class assignments too. In First Design challenge the class was divided in 10 teams of 6/7 people (total class of about 65). The task was to build a robot from kit who could do 5 different tasks. Competition was held last Thursday and it was great to be part of a highly charged atmosphere. Our robot did did not do as well as we anticipated but the competition was fun, it was great a team building exercise and there were lot of learnings.

Some photographs from our Design Challenge-I :

Working on the bot:
















Final version (ready to fire ..:-))
















Competition Arena:
















Other Robots (the ones on the table..:-) :















Yesterday we got our Second Design challenge (DS) in which the class is divided again in to 10 teams but with different people. DS-II is more of a research based project in which we have to choose one of the topics (Global warming, Malnutrition in poor countries/Obesity in developed countries and how we can divide the food more equally in this world). We need to take a systems approach to give a solution to one of these problems and present in class in another 10 days. With hectic last 10 days our group started DS-II with a little introduction and then agreeing that lets take this weekend off to reboot. I came went back home to spend some quality time with wifey and little one. It was nice to to eat some home made food after 10 days of pizza, sandwiches and salad. Heading back to MIT tomorrow.
MIT campus is amazing and is at the most desirable location on the bank of Charles river. Here are some of the campus snaps.

Boston Downtown from MIT Campus:

MIT Main building:






























I'll end today by saying that I'm glad to be here. There is wealth of knowledge here and I hope I'll be able to absorb the little part which will make my time here and future more worthwhile.
Catch you all later.
AD.