Friday Telecommute

Today I am making a point of not going to campus. I can do today's tasks here at home, and besides I have to go in tomorrow anyway for E-bike research. This term has barely started and I am already finding myself spending anywhere from 8-10 hours there, even if classes only last for about half of that time.

This term is a little different than last term. There are much fewer group projects, and there are more small assignments in lieu of large projects. I still have a term paper in Transportation Economics, but I know what he's expecting, so it won't be that bad. Particularly with GIS, it means there will always be much work that needs to be done in the near future. It's also different because a few people have asked me for help or came to me with questions regarding homework or classwork this term. The last two terms this was not the case since our work was primarily papers and memorandums, where the writing skills of my classmates really put me to shame.

I am discovering quite a bit of overlap between my two transportation classes this term. I also have noticed that quite a few of the concepts we are covering were already covered in the Transportation Finance class I took last term. This has gotten me to reconsider what sorts of electives I take next year and question the value of additional transportation courses. Odds are if I took more for instance, land use classes, that I would learn more new things than I would if I stuck just to my transportation specialization. This isn't to say that I have nothing more to learn about transportation, rather that if I want to learn more I will have to do it outside of an academic setting.

I did notice that this time the attendance numbers were smaller and that a higher percentage of them were female. Prior to my cohort, PSU has always skewed strongly female. For my group, they consciously tried to accept more male students, which had the side effect of making admitted students in the Transportation specialization outnumber all the others. Perhaps this time around they want a better balance amongst the specializations so we don't have a case like now where only two people are in Regional Economic Development. I also thought that the low apparent attendance was surprising given how they are trying to expand the program. Perhaps there's a greater share of students that would be coming from out of the region and thus weren't able to afford to fly out and visit. One of the second-year MURPs brought up a good point about maintaining the quality of the program; that continuing the program's reputation in effect strengthens the credentials that we will have obtained. I think this is mostly true, although in say, five or six years I bet my actual work experience will be far more important then the fact that I have a MURP degree from Portland State.