Dara's Personal Reflection

At the beginning of ME 250, I definitely felt overwhelmed.

As a non-ME major taking my second course in the department, I didn’t really know what to expect—after our introduction to the updated course on the first day of class, I was excited and nervous to start our machine, but after the first few homework assignments, I became completely discouraged by how much mechanical engineering knowledge I didn’t have. Through the entire first half of the course, I thought that I was destined to fail, but after studying hard and destroying the mid-term, I started to realize that I did have something to contribute to the class and to my group. Admittedly, I definitely could have pushed myself harder at the beginning of the term, but I think that I was so hung up on the challenge of the class that I had put up a mental block.

This realization was the chief thing I learned in ME 250: although I didn’t necessarily have the same skill set as everyone else in the class, my work ethic and general engineering knowledge could still benefit my design team. If this course continues to be open to students of all engineering disciplines, I suggest that this division of labor based on skill set become part of the project guidelines (i.e. that it’s fine or even encouraged to have specializations within your team).

In terms of more concrete engineering knowledge, I definitely learned more about bearings, gears, and springs than I ever thought I’d know in a lifetime. My favorite piece of information, however, was definitely the knowledge as to how a differential works—over Thanksgiving, I showed my dad and my stepmother the video we saw in class, and they were very impressed as to how much I had learned.

As far as how the course can be improved, I think that the administrative organization definitely appeared to be a bit weak from the viewpoint of the students—at some points, it was definitely frustrating to be crushed under a massive workload while not receiving any feedback on our output. Additionally, originally in the syllabus we were given more time in the final manufacturing stage of the course, but because deadlines on the administrative end kept being pushed back, we were eventually left with less than three weeks to completely manufacture our machines. This led to frustration among the students, the lab staff, and the course instructors which could have been prevented with some more careful planning.

As this course develops, I’m sure that improvements will be made—we were just lucky (or unlucky) enough to be the “guinea pigs” in this case. I would like to commend all of the GSIs who worked on this course, however; they clearly put in many more hours than were strictly required in the shop and advising us on our projects. It was clear at the design expo competition that they truly cared about all of their students (with perhaps the most glaring example of this being the “Sei Jin’s Army” team). They did a great job promoting camaraderie amongst the students—it was clear from the beginning that we were against the project and the arena rather than against each other.

All in all, ME 250 was definitely an experience, and I did learn many things throughout the course about design and manufacturing. Although I won’t be taking ME 350 any time soon, I can now understand how this material is helpful and worthwhile to my field of study.

Happy winter break, everyone!

Dara Fisher