Course Reflection

It has been a long and rough semester. At times it felt like it was all in vain,and my head was going to explode. This was never more true than when we lost our first round because our scoring arm stopped moving due to irregularities in the slot size. Looking back now though, if nothing else I’ve gained some important experience that will make me that much better off in my next design project. While I believe I definitely have gained from this class much of it has been in a non-ideal way.

With regards to design and manufacturing, I am afraid I did not learn nearly as much as I had hoped to. I felt as if much of this aspect of the course was brushed over hastily, and not effectively linked to the assignments. I focused too much on the project and struggling to catch up with CAD, manufacturing, and the homework assignments caused me to lag behind in the lecture material. Furthermore, I felt as if I was not given exercises that effectively helped me learn how to apply the principles taught in class. While more example problems in class, and better exercises would have helped, these could only help so much, as this material is fairly abstract and not applied as straightforwardly as say statics and mechanics. What it comes down to is that the next time I encounter the concepts and material from this class I will have a better background in them, but not a mastery. What I gained the most from in this class was simply the experience of being involved in a serious design project. From working with CAD, to learning basic metal manufacturing techniques, to working with a team on project requiring highly specialized and technical background this project was my introduction to many aspects of engineering projects. This team experience was quite different from my past teams, as allowing the choice of our own teams gave me teammates who I was able to rely on more, and the different requirements of the project allowed for more specialization of roles as is normal in engineering project teams. Finally as far as time management goes, I do not know what I was doing poorly or how to fix it, only that I was doing a poor job, because I felt as if I was working nonstop this semester, yet I still received grades that seemed disproportionate to the time and effort that went into the projects, which likely indicates that the time was not being used effectively, in whether it be the working, or class time. This is my main concern coming out of this class, as workloads will not be getting any lighter, and material is getting more complicated.

All things said and done, I am not very pleased with how this class turned out. I came into this class with high expectations, but feel as if given my relatively little prior experience, the sheer amount of material covered, and having to divide my time between other classes, those expectations never had a hope of being a reality. Short of ignoring my other classes, I wish I had tried to assert my desire to be more involved in the actual design of our machine even though my lack of ability and experience in CAD limited my ability to.  I am glad I gained what I did from the class though and while extremely time consuming and stressful, the project had its moments where it was even fun. I hope to continue my education in design and manufacturing, even though I’m actually an electrical engineer. It’s been fun, but I’m done with blogging I think

-John