My last week!

  Today is my last day here at the Spartan Superway Project. I only have thanks to say, being part of this project was definetly a light for me, that showed me what ways can I trace inside my field of work. I'm very thankfull to professor Furman and Ron Swenson for the opportunity that was gave it to me, Eric Hagstrom was a great manager, he help us and taught me a lot of thigs that will be useful for my work life. I hope the Spartan Superway stays in good hands and have a bright future ahead! I'm more than satisfied to help the project in anyway that I can from Brazil!
  On this last week we're finishing the assembly of our new bogie design and it's gonna be ready for fabrication after today, I hope. I designed a new system for propulsion and I'm going to leave it with the team for them to choose or not if they want to use some parts or all of it in the final assembly.
  After that I wanna thanks to all the people I worked with it here in San Jose and all the great places that I've hade the opportunity to visit in California! It was a life changing experience, not just the California experience but all this year that I've been living in USA through this exchange program. I'll definetly come back to Brazil as a more mature person and with better ideas of what I want to do with my life and my profession! I cannot stop to say thanks all the time because that's the way I'm feeling right now, thankful.

Thank you very much you all! Hope to see you soon!

Sincerely,

Pedro C. Pereira F.

3rd Week

Those past weeks since I've started working with my team at the bogie, I've been learning so much about what mechanical engineering really is. We were having brainstorm and ideas about a new design for the bogie. This really made me think for solutions and improvements that would be useful, looking into the problems of the previous team. We are finishing the new design, adding the idea of a retractil jack, to make easier to take out and put it back again the bogie on the track. I hope this week we finish the model and start to work on its construction.

Proud to join the Spartan Superway!

My name is Pedro Pereira and I just arrive at San Jose last sunday after 3 weeks on the road, from Florida to California, with 5 others participants of the Spartan Superway Project. We all are very excited about the project, is gonna be something the definietly will help to develop my engineer skills. Since I was in my 2nd college year in Brazil, I didn't had much contact with projects like this one before. The opportunities that I had to work outside classroom were few, and now I have to chance to do something really big and dive into the my engineer career. I'm excited with the project that I'm going to work with, with the university that I'm going to be part of and with the city the I'm going to live in. Professor Furman and Professor Ron were very recptive and I know I can count on them in this project! I hope we all can make a great team work together!