Saket Vora

I am re-focusing my efforts at updating this blog on a more regular basis, such as two or three times a week. Like I did with the journal I kept while studying in Sweden last semester, I’d like to explain the fundamental routines of this semester. I’m taking two electrical engineering courses (Controls and Analog Integrated Circuits), an electrical engineering independent research course, an engineering economic analysis course, and an online technical writing course. The research course is the one I’m mainly concerned with, mainly because the precise goals or outcomes desired continues to be a little vague. The field I’m looking into, field programmable analog arrays, is an exciting field but as an undergraduate stepping in there has been a lot of background that I’ve had to first learn. Though at present I am not making real strides in FPAAs, I am learning far more about electrical engineering than had I stayed in the digital signal processing course.

My Mondays, Wednesdays, and Friday usually have me busy from 8am to 3pm. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I don’t have class per se, but I dedicate the entire work day (9am to 5pm) to working on the research project. On MWF I usually grab lunch with my friends.
So you can see a little bit of my university, here are some pictures below. The first is of Engineering Building II, which is located on Centennial Campus and which is still under construction.

This building was supposed to be completed last fall, but construction has been delayed. This next photo is over looking the southern side of the ‘Court of Carolinas’, which is located on the eastern half of the original NC State campus. The lawn you see there is the closest thing we have to a true ‘quad’.

This is a picture of Daniel’s Hall, which used to be where the Electrical and Computer Engineering department was located. NC State is in the process of moving the whole engineering department over to Centennial Campus.

Here is a picture looking into the ‘Brickyard’, the major gathering place at NC State. The round building on the left is Harrelson Hall, which is either loved or hated by students and faculty. All the rooms are curved! On the right you can see a glimpse of the D.H. Hill Library, the university library. It’s probably the tallest building on campus.

This is a picture from a bit of grass lawn we have overlooking the brickyard.

Here is a photo of the D.H. Hill Library. Some universities have several libraries, but so far we have this main one. I’m hoping in 10 or 15 years after the College of Engineering moves to Centennial that they can construct a dedicated ‘Engineering Library’.

Let me say a bit about where I’m living this semester. My Delphi friends — I doubt any experience will ever match the good times I had in N217-230! This is a photo of the outside of my apartment building. These are two-person apartments, and I live on the second floor in the back.

This is the view looking out towards the parking lot from the front of the building. It is a pretty nice and quiet apartment complex.

The living room:

This is what the dining and kitchen area looks like. Oh how I miss the nice Ikea-supplied kitchen we had at Delphi!

Our friends who were in the apartment before Jordan and I were kind enough to leave their furniture for us to use. I brought in this desk cause I wanted a larger work surface, but everything elese is Pat’s (who is in Hawaii now). Looking into my room from the door:

What my desk usually looks like:

And last but not least, a picture of my car. It is a Mazda3 and I thank my parents for trusting me with it!

This should hopefully give you an idea of how things are generally going for me this semester.