At the beginning of the school year I was contemplating engineering majors, unable to decide the best career for my personality and passions. As my first mechanical engineering class, ME 250 has confirmed my thoughts on perusing this exciting and hands on field. My skills and true love for the designing, manufacturing, teamwork, and competing really came apparent in the countless hours my teammates and I spent developing and driving our quarter-finalist, Denard Robinson inspired slotbot machine.
Before this course, I had never used any tools or machinery past table saws and hand drills. The combination of learning and discussing processes in lecture with hours of hands-on time in the shop provided a great opportunity to hone my machining knowledge and skills. The labs were also very helpful with understanding motors, torque and velocity ratios, and the bike lab’s gear ratios. The CAD labs proved much more useful than I had ever imaged and the design process was certainly vital, tedious and slightly underestimated. Luckily I had a teammate with great skills in these programs and enough dedication to make up for the parts drawings that we may have never completed!
With a recent promotion to student project manager at my current research position with the Center for Business Acceleration and Incubation Studies, and the teamwork oriented class of ME 250, I have greatly increased my ability to divide tasks, plan meetings, and make deadlines. Hitting a few minor lacks in communication, my teammates and I really strengthened our management and team organization skills. Patrick did a fantastic job organizing meetings and shop times, and Yong and Chow developed and maintained much of the ctools and blogspot team pages. I find that at both work and in class, keeping a friendly, positive attitude is crucial to a project’s success. I was very lucky to have such a flexible, motivated, kind, and positive team!
Now that I am nearly completed with my final assignment for ME 250!!!, I can reflect on the overall organization and execution of the design and manufacturing class. Firs t of all, I was amazed at how well the class timed out. I thought the due dates and milestones were accurately placed to keep us all going at 110%. I must admit, I am very thankful I wasn’t taking any more engineering courses this semester because my teammates and I were forced to spend an overwhelming amount of more time on this four credit class than the others. It was very rewarding and beneficial, but balancing research, other classes, work, and happiness proved very difficult. I understanding we are a top university for our engineering programs, but there are many, many other aspects to our time at this school. All in all it was a great personal accomplishment, but may have put slight excess stress on my teammates and myself.
As mentioned before, I could have done a few things differently to increase my success in this class. First of all, I should have set more time aside for team meetings and CAD assignments. It always seemed to surprise me at how tedious each task was and I should have paid better attention to Davor’s CAD labs to improve my skills and efficiency in this area.
I find my semester in ME 250 to be a very successful one. I have made great new friends, leaned new skills and background knowledge that will stay with me for the rest of my engineering career. Thank you for the effort and organization that went behind making this class as exciting as it was!
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