Week 2 Reflection

Week 2 Reflection

The time is really flying by, I can’t believe graduation is in less than a week. For the second week of senior project, I spent my time getting to the end of my course so I could start studying for my final exam. I spent the beginning of the week finishing up, learning about all the rules I have to know. I am so thankful that it’s over. Learning 38 different rules with sub-sections was so hard and I’m so proud of myself for being able to navigate and understand them. To keep these rules fresh in my mind, I have practice tests that I’m trying to take every day so I don’t forget everything. I think that the hardest part of this section was learning about all the different lights upon vessels. There are just so many possibilities of what something could be in the dark because of length and other variables. There’s only so much I can memorize, so the rest of it was intuition based.

In the middle of the week, I started the navigation portion of my course, which was supposed to be the second longest section. Because of my background in charting, I got a headstart with this in a sense. I feel like it would’ve been a lot harder if I was starting from nothing, so I’m thankful. The way that the instructors were teaching was a little different from what I was taught but I decided to do it their way. This section was really fun for me to do because a lot of it was math based. It may not be the calculus I’m used to but the simple equations I had to use made me happy. A lot of times, when answering a question, I had to calculate the ETA, speed, or distance, which required speed-distance-time conversions. Fun for me. Another thing I had to do was convert true compass bearings into a per ship’s compass bearing, which I did by determining the deviation and variation and adding and subtracting them based on if they were West or East. It’s hard to explain here, it’s kind of something you have to see for yourself. 

When I took quizzes to see how I was doing with these skills, most of the time, I did really well. I found that there were a bunch of really close answers, and if I wasn’t being super concise with my calculations, I would get the wrong answer. This forced me to really slow down and double-check everything I was doing. This was my goal for the week. To slow down and take my time because there was so much time without any other commitments. It was frustrating when I got a problem wrong because of a silly little mistake but I would take a step back, grab a snack and go back to it until it was perfect. This is something I’m still working on but it’s so important to what I’m doing because perfection does matter when it comes to plotting courses.


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