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No excuses.  Now get to work on comics.  To hell with all the heathen science!

This is The Agent speaking...

Yeah, on my internship last year I learned that Architects don't mess with all the structural and system details that much either.  They are like indicated on the plans and then set off to the engineers to work it out.  Anyway, the reason why those classes were so hard was because we had to do all of it by hand and memorize all those formulas.  In real life, there are programs that already figure out most of that junk and you can always look up the formulas in your trusty standards books.  The only reason why I could stay afloat in those classes was that I made A's on all the homework and projects.  It was just my exam grades that stunk.

Steve:  , I'll be sure not to let you know so you'll always be leery of new buildings.

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Yeah it is.  It's also my weakest subject.  Not that my buildings would fall down, I understand the concepts and I tend to over compenstate on the structural components (columns, beams) by designing them larger than required (only an act of God could level my buildings  ), but as for accurately calculating the exact size of beam I need (as in the barest minimum, which may be more effiecient, but slightly dangerous imho), that's where I usually mess up.  My structural ethic is more along what the ancients did.  Take the pyramids for example.  Just a few tiny rooms and hallways and everything else is just solid rock.  Those buildings aren't going anywhere or suddenly collapse anytime soon.  

Now I say my other weak ARCH subject is Systems (plumbing, electricity, HVAC, etc.), since I barely passed Systems I.  On Systems II I still had no idea what was going on, but I got an A nevertheless.   Still, to be weak in those subjects is not to big of a thing for my profession.  He just have to grasp the basic concepts of them.  We deal mainly in design...and then we hire engineers and contractors that specialize in these subjects to do all practical work while we're in dreamland and getting all the credit.

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HE LIES!!!!   Nah, maybe its the program...or maybe its the math that's involved with the Structural Physics classes.  Now that stuff is hard.

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I go to Texas A&M, the arch conservative school of the U.S. *waves American flag*.  Still, I can't say the same about the teachers, especially the College of Architecture profs, which 80% of them are cooky to the extreme.  Heck, the teachers in Harry Potter seemed more in touch with the real world than these guys.  As for the guy who grew his hair out, I have no problem with guys who have sometimes have long hair *eyes once long-haired Matt now with short hair*, and he grew this really ugly pointed goatee that looked like pubic hair (he made posters advertising his shaving featuring just the goatee.  If you didn't know the guy personally, you'd a thought it was a picture of red pubic hair, it was nasty!  ) 

He was the my 2nd most hated student there and his best friend (who had better hygiene habits) was my most hated person there.  That guy I hated in that the profs. lauded over his designs all the time and he was a big "know it all" that would make lectures drag on and on and on just because he liked to here himself talk.  Profs liked to call him "inventive" in that his buildings didn't recognize gravity.  Not "defy" gravity, they just didn't take it into account.  He designed buildings that floated above the ground and were upside down and people walked through them in the 4th dimension.  So he never did physical models (because it would be impossible to building something like that in the real world), so he used computer models (which he was quite good at), but the interiors were never fully designed either.  So basically he's have this big flashy splash image of the exterior on a poster.  Profs. just loved it.  Of course it didn't matter that his buidling could never be built and he didn't fullfill any of the design requirements.   Now in my opinion, what he did would be good for computer graphics in movies or something, but useless in our world where there actually is gravity.

Oh, and I don't know where people thinks there is a lot of math in architecture.  For my school, only two business maths were required.  The major itself was mostly art and design focused.

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Oh, neat! It seems like not many people go into architecture anymore. Nowadays everyone wants to be a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher. Or at least in my experiences those are three most popular professions. About half of everyone I meet wants to go into one of those areas. It's craziness.

Well, a lot of has to do that its one of the hardest majors.  Not to say that becoming a lawyer or doctor is any easier per se, but at least in Law and Medicine all the answers are basically in a book.  Architecture on the other hand is mostly a subjective major.  One teacher may give you an A on a project declaring it the best in the class, while another will give you a C if you are lucky and declare that you set back the design profession at least ten years.  Last Fall I had a professor give me a C on a project that I did all that was required, worked over 48 hrs straight on the model without sleeping, and did a hell of a lot more than some of the other groups (a lot of them didn't even finish).  When we presented the projects I ended up getting lower grades than some of the students with the unfinished projects.  (to get to know how odd this guy was, he purposely wore his belt buckle off to the side to purposly "throw off symmetry.")  It was a 6 hr class to boot, so it really hurt my GRA at a time I needed it to be high to get into grad school.   Still, I put that project into my grad. school portfolio (you never put the grades you made in the portfolio for obvious reasons), and that project got me two letters of reccommendation from other professors that saw it.  I've been heralded as a good student by some profs, and others have humiliated me in front of class saying stuff like, "You don't know the first thing about design" or "You're not devoted enough to the arch of architecture" (this coming from a prof. after three solid nights of working on a single project with circles around my darks that wear so dark, you might I thought I had on thick rimmed glasses).  And then of course there's the architecture student's that constantly got As on their work.  Usually their "designs" had nothing to do with architecture.  Like this one guy didn't get a haircut or shave the entire year, then set up a publicity stunt in the atrium where he was shaved in public and did yoga afterwards.  This was declared by many of the faculty as a "Great Work of Art" and he was given an A in his studio for doing nothing while the rest of us toiled endlessly on projects that had something to do with making buildings.  ARG!

But...that's water under the bridge now since I got into grad school.  As for your GRE, since you're college says the scores don't really matter so much for admission, I'd say that your target should be anything over 1200.  Oh, and aren't the prices of those courses highway robbery?   As useful as they are, I can't believe they get away with charging us $1000 fees on them.  Oh, and another thing about the GRE, it's a "smart" test.  You take it on the computer.  The first five to ten questions each section gauge your abilities.  So after you answer the first few questions and then suddenly they start getting really hard and complex, take it as a good sign that you're doing well.  If the questions start getting really easy, then you're probably doing pretty bad because the test adapted to you getting wrong answers and thus gave you easy ones because it pitied you.

If you've got any more questions on the GRE and the like, I'll be happy to answer.

This is The Agent speaking...

I'm getting my Masters in Architecture.  Don't worry about the GRE, if you did good on your SATs in high school, the GRE is basically the same thing, but be sure to study or take a refresher course.  The course helped me a lot.

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Interesting  You know, I really should update that thing into something resembling a decent website.  At least something worthy of my Environmental Design degree.

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Welcome back Agent.
I agree.  Unfortunately my new internship is eating much of my spare time, but I try to make it on here every other day or so, just to check up and see if anything's "a-buzzin".

Thanks.  When I came back last year I was suddenly struck down by one architecture project after another (man, I was a wreck by May).  So, now I finally have my bachelor's degree and await grad school. 

As for FODI, I don't suspect anything MAJOR happened in the plotline...unless my character finally happened to be introduced in a cameo...huh Matt?   Not that I don't like my FODI classic avatar, but I'd would be nice to have him in the current FODI style. lol  Oh, and yes, my vanity has no ends.

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Awesome movie.  Its one of the few movies that lived up to its hype.  Still, they did have Starscream shoot at Megatron, so its nice that they gave a nod to that traditional storyline.  I wonder if Unicron will be in the sequel.

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Thank you kind lady.  Hopefully I'll stick around a little longer than my last visit about a year ago. 

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What's really frightening to me is that shortly before you posted, I was looking at your site.

The Interdimensional Black Hole between us strikes again!     Were you looking at my old "Secret Base" one that I haven't updated in four years?  Or the International Evil Collective forum at http://evil.nightmasks.org/ which is the only thing I actively mess with and edit from time to time. 

In fact, it is the IEC that has brought me here.  In the past few days at that forum, a major gathering of the old Night Masks (Dasha, Delg, and Marand) has been taking place in one of its many hidden forums and the subject of the fabled "The Mystical One" briefly came up, since you still are the "Scum Sucking Lt." of that organization I suddenly thought, "Hey, I haven't been to FODI in nearly a year.  Whatever happened to that guy?"  So here I am and here you are.  If you're interested in the "Convention" that is going on, just hop on down to http://evil.nightmasks.org/ sign up, and give it 24hrs or so till we give you access to the secret room.

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I LIVE!!!!

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Wow!  I guess I have a lot of back issues to read this summer.

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Sure, I'll friend you on my Stalkbook account.  Steve's been on my friend list for about a year.