Master thesis presentation (igcabka* graduation)

Posted on Friday, June 2nd 2017, 0:39 by Alexandra

So, today was kind of a big deal. After being enrolled at Chalmers since 2010 (7 years), or 5.5 years of full time studies, I am finally done. The report was approved a couple of days ago, yesterday we got the publication number and we sent it in today after we finished our presentation. I was honored by the presence of both my mom and dad and Karin during the presentation, and I honestly think that made me more nervous than I would have been without them.

The presentation went really well. I hadn’t practiced overly much, but, as soon as I went up there, it was like it all got stuck in my head and I spoke freely and only looked at my notes a few times. I stumbled on words a few times, but I don’t think anyone really noticed. And also, it doesn’t really matter, I am human after all.

So, what now? Well, I have applied for many jobs, nothing decided yet, but until it is, I have Liseberg. Hopefully this will have worked itself out after the summer so I can start being an adult for real then. I am really excited to start working and if everything goes according to my plan, I will have a blast!

This MSc degree will be celebrated by sleeping and reading (and maybe play som Guild Wars 2 again for the first time in a month) all weekend long! I can’t wait for some well-deserved time off before I start working at Liseberg on June 23rd. Sure, there are some stray days here and there at the school I am working at, but that barely counts. This time off will be the most amazing freetime of my life. I will enjoy every second of it, I swear!

*I guess can also be known as

Adventure time in the middle of the night

Posted on Wednesday, December 14th 2016, 18:31 by Alexandra

Ugh, sleep deprivation is truly the worst. School is killing me! Yesterday morning I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, but by the evening it was hard to see anymore. We were finalizing our Revit project last night. So I was in school in the morning, work in Kungsbacka in the afternoon and then back to school. I didn’t think we would stay too long, but we ended up staying until 00:30. Crazy!

I took the 6 tram home because nothing else relevant was running at that time. I noticed too late that it didn’t take its usual way so I ended up somehwere I wasn’t sure where. There was one tram left going back to downtown. But I wasn’t sure if it went that way or not. But at that time, my internet completely died. I couldn’t double check. I called mom and she said she would pick me up in downtown so I wouldn’t have to wait there for 30 min for the tram back home. I would not feel safe standing there all alone in the dark… My mom is the best! Getting out of bed at 1 in the morning to drive me home. She is the best!

I had to get up shortly after 6, after 4 hours of sleep and sit through 3h of presentations at work and then back to school for meetings with everyone I am working with right now. Crazy day! I feel awful, I feel physically ill. But I can’t go to bed just yet. I have to prepare for the two presentations I have tomorrow, both in the morning in different parts of town. Yay!

That will be the end of this year, though. But two individual assignments are due the second week of January based on these two courses, but that is it, when it comes to courses at Chalmers. Then it is only my master thesis left. Shit, am I ready for this?

Break time is over, back to studying and preparing for tomorrow. Here are some of the rendered pictures that took forever last night. Enjoy!

Here are also the names we gave the streets and neighborhoods. Mine is Mjölkdisken (~Dairy Counter) with the skyscraper Gräddhyllan (~Cream Shelf) (which I now realized after looking at Wikipedia, means a neighborhood with fancy houses) as the eye magnet to the whole neighborhood. The other neighborhood we designed (we only designed 4 out of the 14) are Filbunken (~Bowl of fil – I think fil is a Swedish thing), Glassbägaren (~Ice Cream Bowl) and Ostkällarn (~Cheese Basement). Vällingby (~Formula Village) is the name of the pre-school in the area. The roads are named:
A-Filen (a type of Swedish fil)
Strössegränd (~Sprinkle Alley)
Lattestigen (~Latte Trail)
Cheddarbacken (~Cheddar Slope)
Mejeriallén (~Dairy Avenue) which is the main, walking only street.

I guess you can see a theme here? The old dairy factory of Arla used to be there, or is actually today, but it will be torn down to make housing. For those of you who are located in Gothenburg, or know the city, this is the area on the other side of Ica Maxi in Mölndal. This is right next to Smörgatan in Kallebäck.

It has been a fun project, and I am very satisfied with the result. And especially considering I have never even opened Revit before this class started. It would have been much more fun without the stress though. Too little time, too much to do. Tomorrow we are presenting it on a special screen (I think it was about 12 square meters big!) and with the help of VR glasses. I think I will make a short video walking around in the neighborhood and post it on my instagram (AlexBemm) if you want to see the 3D-environment. Maybe tomorrow, if I figure out how to make videos directly from what is happening on the screen.

Spontaneous book purchase

Posted on Thursday, December 8th 2016, 20:22 by Alexandra

It was not my intention to go to Science Fiction bokhandeln (Sci-fi bookstore), but I tagged a long when my boyfriend wanted to go there. I ended up buying Siri Pettersen’s book Odinsbarn, the first in the trilogy called Ravneringene. It was originally written in Norwegian in 2013 and has a pretty high rating on Goodreads. I have also heard a lot of good words from people and reviews, so I am really excited to read it soon.

Other than that, my life is a mess right now. The end of the quarter is coming up and I really feel like I am done with school now. I have been enrolled at Chalmers since 2010. I am ready to move on. It just feels rotten that I don’t enjoy the end of my last two classes ever because both of them are group projects. One is going fine and we are on schedule. The other one though, the really fun one is not going so well. We have to send it in on Wednesday and we are not close to done. I am done with my part, so next step is to put our four different files together and create the space between the houses, and make the presentation for Thursday. We don’t really have time and I feel stressed. The project is to create a neighborhood in Revit, a 3D CAD program. It is really fun and I have learned a lot. But it is sad that my experience in this class falls on other people. It is also sad that I had limited time so I couldn’t do everything the way I wanted. Much of this took so long, and I would have loved to make it better. I might continue to make it better after it is done.

This is what my part for the project looks like. This is not a rendered picture so the materials aren’t really visible. Maybe I will do one of those tomorrow and post it. The ground was almost black today for some reason, maybe it was some setting on that specific computer, I don’t know.

I haven’t posted any pictures of my cats lately, so here’s two cute ones!

And I finish this post with a picture from work last weekend. Liseberg might not be as fun as it was before, but it sure is pretty!

New job

Posted on Wednesday, August 17th 2016, 18:48 by Alexandra

I think I have written something about this new job that I would get this fall. Well, three days have passed already with preparing for the upcoming school year. I feel rather confident with the role as a teacher that I will have. We are three brand new teachers (who never ever worked as teachers before) and we all got the teacher education (which is normally 5-6 years) in 2 days. The other teachers there are very helpful, but when it comes to the planning of my 3 courses I am pretty much on my own. I have read the course syllables and they feel strict, but at the same time I can do whatever as long as I go through all the points in the central contents and test the students on the grade requirements. I am glad my classes don’t start until August 31^st. That gives me 2 week to prepare. I am surprised that 3 full classes are only 30% work. It feels like a lot.

The school anyway is a small computer game developing high school where I will have one course in each year. Basic engineering for the first-years, CAD for the second-years, and Construction for the third-years.

This week is full time with preparations, next week the students are arriving and I will there to greet the new ones on Monday and then I have 2 days off (after 8 straight days of work) to prepare and I think my own studies start that same week. I will only take 2 classes this fall since I can transfer the 3 German classes I took in California. That will be so nice, study 50% and work the rest and make more money and make my debt smaller. I just hope that UCSD will be able to send my transcript to Chalmers and that it will work out, otherwise I am pretty screwd since I have now only applied for two classes and 50% loans. Otherwise I have to take one more class before getting my Master of Science.

I think it will be a fun fall. I will probably play less Pokemon Go (I am halfway to lvl 25) when it gets colder, and that will probably make me play more Guild Wars 2 (one of my new co-workers play as well, so that’s awesome!) and read more. I am almost finished with the last book in the Unfortunate Events series, but before I write my first book review I need to come up with a template that I will follow. Maybe I will do that now. I am too tired to keep doing the school planning now, there’s another day tomorrow.

Promotion, surgery, and lots of other things

Posted on Friday, June 10th 2016, 0:03 by Alexandra

I honestly want to write more often, but I have been so busy. My first year as a master student at Chalmers is done, and I think I passed everything. The last two grades haven’t been registered yet, but I have a good feeling about it. The last assignment we did in International Projects was really interesting. We acted as consultants for a company who wanted to build a pharmaceutical plant in Uganda, so we did a full analysis of the process and I would love to do that as a living in the future if I am lucky enough.

And speaking of school, I have decided to stay at home in Sweden this fall. I have done the whole studying abroad thing, and I really feel like being home this fall will be nice and easier. It just feels more right to stay at home.

Another big thing that happened was that I got promoted at work. A few weeks ago I got the surprising news that I will be an operator at Helix, which means that I won’t just check the restraints, I will actually be the one in charge of the whole attraction. Lots of responsibility, but I am so excited! The training for the position will start on Monday and I will be done on Midsummer Eve. This does not only mean that I will get a much higher salary, but I will be stuck on the Mountain and not be in the pool anymore. I won’t be at the Balderado area where I am stuck with two attractions. This whole spring I have been mostly there and have actually gotten pretty badly injured because of the monotone work I did there. My hip and knee is all broken. According to my new schedule I will be in the pool this fall again, but hopefully they will fix it so I am only on the Mountain then too.

The only other Liseberg-related thing I can think about, is that one day last week when I was heading down to lunch, a pigeon flew into my face, that was kind of weird.

And speaking of other jobs, today I got two more! First today I tried to work in an Yves Rocher store downtown. They thought I did a good job and I will start working there as soon as I have time and they need me, yay! Right after that I was at an interview for a company where students act as substitutes in schools on different levels. I got that job directly after the interview was done. That will be so exciting! But since school is done for this academic year, I will start in August with that.

Hmm, anything else? Oh right! I recently did a new PAP-test, which I do every three months since the cell changes won’t go away. And they still haven’t. So now they have decided that it has taken long enough time that it is time to remove it. I got an appointment for surgery next Friday. I am a little nervous, but not too much, I am sure it will be fine. I am glad they are finally going to do something about it and hope it will go away for good.

Everything is also fine with Cleo and Ramses. We made some big changes around here about three weeks ago and Cleo seems to be feeling a lot better now and hasn’t peed in the bed since then. Every morning, Ramses is so cuddly and sleeps by our faces, and some mornings Cleo does it too. He is still scared and doesn’t like to be hold when he doesn’t want to. But I love them both.

Now I should probably go to bed, I have a 10 hour day at Liseberg tomorrow. Here are some random pictures from the last month:

Ramses got neutered but couldn’t stop licking himself, so he had this cone on for a few days. It was not super nice waking up early in the morning when he wanted to cuddle and we got that big thing up in our faces, haha. I played a tournament in the beginning of May with Miriam, and we actually came in third in the B-finals. Not bad at all 😀 My oldest cousin graduated high school last week and in two weeks she is moving to USA to be an au pair. She will have an awesome year. Västtrafik has out in new signs in the trams to thank everyone from different backgrounds that go together on the public transit, and this sign shows a man holding his phone. I thought it was funny. Cleo wanted to come with me to school. Ramses as well. This is Cleo every time I take a shower. He literally uses his paw to withdraw the curtain to make sure that I am still alive, haha!

Northumbria or Chalmers?

Posted on Thursday, April 21st 2016, 0:14 by Alexandra

When I applied for this master program late last summer I didn’t expect to get in, the name of the program sounded interesting, it could be a good back-up plan if I didn’t get a job, which I didn’t. So it turned out great. I had no idea what it meant to pursue an MSc degree, and even less what International Project Management meant. It basically means that I prolonged getting a job with two years and being part of a class of around 40 people where a big majority of them are foreigners. It also means that, to get international experience, one semester abroad at another university is an option. That semester is coming up and I have no idea what to do. I know from experience that writing it down can help, and also some help from my few readers perhaps? The university abroad is called Northumbria and is located in Newcastle, England and I would spend 3 months there (mid-September to mid-December).

Here are the pros and cons I can think of at this moment.

NORTHUMBRIA
+ If I go and then do my master thesis on my own I will get 2 MSc degrees.
+ I will get more experience
+ It will hopefully be fun (I have heard that there are lots of drinking going on there and since I don’t drink I am afraid that I will feel left out).
+ It is only 3 months away from home.
+ Jesper and I can scratch more countries on our Scratch Map if he comes and visit me (England is close to Sweden and it is rather cheap to fly there).
– I have signed a contract for Liseberg until mid-October.
– It will be expensive and I would have to take extra student loans.
– I will be away from Jesper for 3 months.
– I will be away from Cleo for 3 months (I am pretty much the only one he really likes).
– I won’t be able to play any beach volleyball (and just as I was getting started with it again…).
– The courses don’t seem too interesting and I can’t change them:
Research skills and methods of inquiry
Project, Programme and Portfolio Management
Risk and Value Management
Project Sustainability

CHALMERS
+ I can transfer the German credits I got at Cal Poly so I can study 50%, work more and make more money.
+ I can choose whatever classes I want to. And I can choose to take either 2 or 4 depending on if I want to transfer the German credits:
Urban Metabolism
Managing Stakeholders for Sustainable Development
Project, Simulation and Modeling in Urban Planning
Quality Management
Environmental Impact Assessment
+ I can start early on my master thesis if I want to.
+ I can save money.
+ I don’t have to quit my job at Liseberg.
+ I don’t have to be away from Jesper nor Cleo.
+ I can play lots of beach volleyball.
– I will only get 1 MSc degree.
– No abroad experience.

I have already figured out where I want to live if I go, so that’s not a stress element. I made a brief budget and with the extra student loan, after both rent back home and in Newcastle, I will have about 6500 SEK per month to spend on food, cell phone and stuff. And that is without the money I will be able to save after working at Liseberg all summer.

It would be so nice to continue my good life here at home and only study 50% this fall and take it a little chill. But at the same time, 2 master degrees and a semester abroad sounds like fun. I don’t know what to do. Last day I have to decide is June 1^st, so I have a little more time. But before May 10^th, I have to pick classes for Chalmers for the fall and I have to apply for university housing in Newcastle as soon as possible… Decisions.

And here are some random pictures:

Jesper’s new baby sister Joeli. Such a cutie! She didn’t make a sound during the whole time we visited. And Benji, the proud big brother couldn’t let go of Youtube. Family birthday party, Ramses is of course in the middle of it all. Having two cats means always being observed. Cleo and Ramses had a party when Jesper accidently spilled food. Ramses sleeping in the sink. My new background on my phone.