Prologue

Sometime in mid-May (a couple weeks after I got confirmed), I went back to the lab to get logistic stuff settled and to meet with my supervisor Jim again. First I signed a series of contracts with one of the secretaries there. Literally, just "sign here," "sign there"--I really didn't read anything. -_-

Oh well, I'm pretty sure it was mostly for pay and stuff anyway. I did notice one of them stated that anything I produced would be the property of UC Berkeley. Not that I'm really "producing" anything this summer anyway.

Then Jim showed me what I would be doing this summer. He has three circuit boards (pictures to come), all of which were laid out by an engineer who recently passed away, and he wanted me to reimplement them (with some changes) on this program called PADS. Honestly, I had no idea why he accepted me to work with him; in our interview, I blatantly told him, somewhat shamefully, that I had no experience whatsoever in boards--I still haven't taken my undergrad circuits course yet.

Detour--this was the reason why I chose this job in the first place over another one. The other involved heavy programming in C, a language with which I have little experience aside from the related C++. But after some heavy debating, I decided that, for all my CS experience, I have virtually no EE to match it up--some EECS major I am. Naturally, since Jim was willing to take me, I was quite keen to accept.

Anyway, so he showed me the boards, as well as the matching schematics (circuit diagrams), and he kinda led me through them and how they worked. At the time I got lost pretty quickly; both the terminology and the complex circuitry was more than I could bear, having been exposed to almost none of it before. Yes, I took physics, but all that amounted to here was being able to identify which part was a capacitor and which part was a resistor.

Feeling fairly unconfident at the end of the meeting, I walked out of there with pretty low expectations about the upcoming summer. The learning curve seemed so steep, and how was I supposed to do a job which involves dealing with things that I have never worked with before?