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Published: June 28th 2010
Fruit Forest and Wang Donghai
This guy can eat like a beast.So here are my final moments in Hangzhou as a part of Team Super Big Big. Our team name came from a japanese restaurant that we all ate at that had terrible translations for the menu items. My team decided on Super Big Big, a burger, and the other teams chose to be Team Big Sausage Saute and Team Ketchup Taste Rice Omelet. We got to class early to practice our presentations. My team was team number 1 so we had to go first, and Dr. Z and Dr. Buckner gave some good advice as to things we failed to mention in our presentation that would’ve helped our case. This was actually the first time that we had seen the work of the other groups. We didn’t really share ideas between groups throughout the six weeks, and as such each group focused on different things. Our group focused on cutting out process cost, while the other groups focused on cutting out material cost. Maybe I can upload our presentation to travelblog. Anyway, the other groups went to eat lunch but my group stayed after for a little while to practice a couple more times. I thought we were sufficiently prepared and
Fruit Forest and Gu Yan
I'm gonna miss Gu Yan a lot. This was our preparatory lunch for our presentation. so we all went to fruit forest for some lunch. Wang Donghai can eat like it’s his job.
So the project involved redesigning the primary and secondary access ladders to CAT’s Medium Wheel Loader. China is known for its competitive pricing and the MWL is one of the most cost competitive machines. CAT has lost some market share because despite the fact that their products are near indestructible, they’re also expensive. Our job was to make these ladders 20% cheaper while maintaining good quality, but we didn’t have any real cost figures, so a lot of it was just guesswork and relative cost cutting. Prior to redesign the ladders had factors of safety of about 50 and we cut it down to 10 (people don’t weigh 8000 lbs.).
After lunch, we headed back to our room to give our presentation to CAT. Dr. Z gave some opening words and said he was really proud of how well of a job we had done, and Team Super Big Big was allowed to step up to the plate. We had some humor in our slides, some Finite Element Analysis, and everyone in our group did a great job of presenting.
Dr. Z speaking to CAT
Some opening words to get us going. Dr. Z was really proud of our projects and made it known to CAT. Nobody was really afraid of public speaking, but speaking to a crowd in English was definitely a first for the Chinese students. We helped them with certain words they were having trouble with, but for the most part they didn’t need any help. Their English had improved significantly since the first time we’d spoken with them. After us was team Crucial Dankness, David’s new team name because he thought Team Big Sausage Sauté was inappropriate. We used a broomstick to point things out on our slide and Tan’s group used a baton he’d bought at the night market for 20 kuai. After the presentations were finished, it became pretty apparent that we’d impressed the hell out of both Dr. Z and Paul Watts, the owner of the CAT plant in Suzhou. He was pretty excited about taking our ideas back to his plant and implementing some of them.
We followed up our presentations with a trip to Zijingyang campus, the prettier of the two campuses in Hangzhou. We had a tour of the undergraduate engineering labs at Zhejiang University. To say that the older NC State engineers were jealous would be an understatement. They had hundreds of machines across
Team Super Big Big
John, Gu Yan, and Wang Donghai dozens of rooms, from presses to laser cutters to things whose functions I couldn’t even figure out. The engineering facilities were superb. We followed up with a group picture and headed back to campus.
Friday was an even bigger day than Thursday. It was our last chance to spend time with our group members, so John and I spent the whole day with them. Gu Yan met with Dr. Z to talk about getting her graduate degree in the US then accompanied John and I to trust-mart. John had his heart set on getting some turtles and racing them in a circle. We got two good sized Brazilian turtles as our choices. Both were fighting to get out of the aquarium when we got there, so we knew they were the racing type. I named mine Kobe Bryant and John named his Boluo (Chinese for pineapple). We got back to campus and got our cameras and rounded up a posse to watch the first annual turtle races at Zhejiang University. Me, John, Avery, Cath, Wang Donghai, Gu Yan all went to the basketball courts (it was raining so there was nobody there, and Kobe felt comfortable on the courts
of course) to start the race. It wasn’t really a race to see which one would get out of the circle first as much as it was a race to see which one would get out of their shell first. Whichever one would take the first leg out of their shell would win every time. Kobe won the first one, followed by Bulou, then Kobe closed the championship out.
Turtle racing was followed by bottleball on the track. Bottleball is a sport invented by us that involves a tee, a water bottle that is a fraction of the way full, and a bamboo stick as a bat. The batter assigns a point value to each hit and whoever comes up with the bottle gets the points. The first person to 500 points becomes the new batter. On the slick, wet grass, in the rain, it was competitive, messy, slippery, and tons of fun. There was nobody else near the track because of the rain. We had a couple more mini turtle races including an uphill race in which Boluo decided he wanted to go further downhill. Gu Yan gave bottleball a try and said that hitting was a lot
Li Yong and his Baton
Presenting team Crucial Dankness' idea like tennis (I don’t think the Chinese have heard of tee ball). We freed the turtles in a stream near our campus and they came up out of the stream to wave us goodbye as the stream carried them away. Everyone took a shower to get warm after spending the last couple hours in the rain followed up by watching Ip Man 2.
We all dressed up for our final banquet together and everybody looked good. We met in the lobby of the International Dorm and when everyone was ready walked to some science building for the banquet. The dean was unable to attend but his representative came to the dinner. We started the dinner off by singing 2 Chinese songs we’d practiced in our class, “Liang Zhi Laohu” and “Dui Mian De Nu Hai Kan Guo Lai” the latter of which I recommend looking up and listening to. They brought tons of food out and NC State was paying for the dinner so we had a ton of beer delivered to our table. Between the 12 engineers, maybe 30 beers were brought out. We toasted to everyone and everything we could think of, we told stories that made
everyone laugh, and I got another lazy susan video of everyone in their dress clothes. Awards were given out to everyone for completing the program and I discovered I’d gotten a 97 on my Chinese Final. We gave our Chinese teacher the American name “Emery” because she didn’t want to be called “Lucy” and Dylan kept trying to give her the name “Paperclip”. We got a lot of gifts with the Zhejiang University logo on it and we got to have one final celebration with our Chinese teammates.
We still weren’t done though. We all went to reggae bar to watch the Portugal vs. Brazil world cup game. Most of the Chinese students had never been to a bar before and were worried if it was going to be safe or not. We got some front row seats to the game that the waitress said we had to pay extra for, so we bought 8 beers and some pizza to split. There were no points scored in the game, but it was nice to spend an extra couple hours with our Chinese friends. I’m gonna miss them a lot and I hope to keep up with them while I’m
Dr.Z and Dr. Buckner
Not sure why Dr. Buckner was in China. He was really nice though and enjoyed our presentations. back in the US. We’re heading to Beijing after this to do some post-program touring. This program has definitely had an impact on both the Americans and the Chinese students we worked with. We were kind of a guinea pig group; this was Dr. Z’s first time teaching a class with both Chinese and American students in it. He’d come to the university the first time (this was his fifth time) with the hope of eventually teaching a class with both kinds of students, and it was a resounding success. I almost feel like I live here. However, I still miss my family and I really appreciate people trying to keep in contact with me, so I’d like to thank everyone. The next uploads should contain some pictures of the Temple of Heaven and the Great Wall, so stay tuned! Ming tian jian!
-No Knee Mcgee
P.S.- Travelblog doesn't accept the extensions on my video files so i'll have to show them to whoever wants to see them when I get back to the US.
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stellamyla
Gu Yan
Hey~
I like your blog^ ^I miss you guys so much that I can't believe we were still together just one week ago@ @~ How's your trip to Beijing? Looking forward;-)