Personal Course Reflection

This class taught me a lot about what goes into the designing process. I learned that one has to think about almost everything from how we are going to machine a part to leaving enough room for a screw head. It was definitely an experience unlike any other I have had before. As for the manufacturing side, this experience has given me a lot of practice with machining on the mill. It helped me work on techniques and also reading engineering drawings. The machining experience also gave me a feel for how important machining tolerances are and how to properly tolerance parts based on how precise they need to be. Also I learned to plan for the worst and hope for the best. As for the teamwork side, the project helped me realize that a good group effort up-front leads to a much easier end result. When everyone works together from the start it just keeps rolling throughout the project. Time management was key to this project and was definitely eye-opening when realizing how much time and work needed to go into this project from the machining to the homework and MS assignments. Budgeting for time was necessary in the project and that was evident mid-way through. Time lost was not able to be regained and with all other classes piling up, it definitely hit us hard.

One way the course could be improved is more instruction. When leaving this up for such subjective grading, it is hard to interpret what the grader wants to see. I understand that its all about how well you do relative to others, but at some points we had to guess what was meant by the instructions on some of the homework. Even asking the professors for help was vague and unclear. Also, I feel as though there was a lot of homework and lab projects that did not pertain to the material in lecture. It was not connected well and the relation between lecture material and homework could definitely be improved. In addition, the lectures on the different mechanical components was nice but boring. Maybe going through a class or lab design of a simple device would have been good in order to get a general feel for the design process. I think that the material on the exam was briefly touched on. The lectures gave us quite a bit of material and didn't focus enough on any of it, which made it difficult to know what to study. With so much information, it was hard to figure out what was going to be on the exam. Also, starting off with more about the design process would have helped our team because we would know more about how to properly design something instead of making drastic changes down the road near the end of the project.

One way I could have improved my performance in this class was putting forth more effort in the beginning with the homework and getting a head start with the teamwork. We waited a little too long to dive into our project, and when we did, all of our other classes started to get heavy as well.