Drew Cottrell
Mechanical Engineering ’19

 

 

 


Tuesday

Tuesday is my long day of the week for classes. First, I had a Strategy course where we talked about different types of organizational structures and how communication channels change depending on how the organization is set up. My professor, Dr. Dool, previously worked for GE and had real work experiences that he is able to bring into the classroom. Then, I had an Entrepreneurship class where we are learning about cryptocurrencies. Being able to learn about a topic like this in the classroom shows the competitive advantage that our school has against others. None of my friends at other schools have any idea about cryptocurrencies unless they’ve gone and done research on their own. After going home quickly to make a PB&J sandwich, I went to my night class, Project Management Fundamentals. This is a graduate course that I am taking as part of the 4+1 master’s program. It gives a great overview on different management techniques, and we discussed organizational structures, just like we did in my Strategy class. It was intriguing to learn about the same topic in two different classes and see how looking at the structures from different ways affected how I thought about organizational structures.

Thursday

I woke up at 5:15am for our 6:30am practice. As a student assistant coach for lacrosse, I help with running the drills at practice, primarily on the defensive side. Sometimes it’s tough to have an early morning practice, but our team brought a lot of energy and we had a great practice. After practice, I had two classes. One of which was my Entrepreneurship class where we heard a presentation on Filecoin. It is a cryptocurrency that works by big data centers allowing a file sharing program on their unused memory. If you allow other people to use your memory to store their data, Filecoin pays you tokens. It is interesting to me that all of these cryptocurrencies are being created, and I can’t wait to see what they look like in 5-10 years.

Friday

Again, we had a morning practice starting at 6:30am. This was our last practice before the game on Saturday, so it was important to have a good practice to get some momentum rolling into the weekend. After practice, I went back to my apartment to work on a group project and to make lunch. Friday is my day of only one class, Decision Making, which takes place from 1-3:30pm. During this class, we discussed some of the failures of decision making during NASA’s Columbia mission. Particularly, we discussed the fact that NASA had been overconfident in their work, as they didn’t have concrete protocol for how to deal with emergencies. Following class, our team got on a bus and took a four-and-a-half-hour drive to Peabody, MA to get to our hotel. We got in around 11:30pm and were able to get some rest the night before our game.

Saturday

Even though I had to stop playing lacrosse because of an injury, I now get to coach our varsity team as a student-assistant. This morning, after breakfast at the hotel, the coaching staff gave one final overview on the scouting report and our game plan. We then got on the bus for our half hour drive to Endicott College for our game. It was a little bit of a sloppy game at half time, but we were winning 5-1. We played better in the second half and ended up winning 14-4. It was a nice out-of-conference win for our team.

 

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