Austin Murtland - Individual Reflection

Foreword:

ME 250 was one of my favorite classes I have taken in the engineering school, and it has assured me that I am in the correct major of mechanical engineering. I enjoyed every aspect of the course, from developing an initial strategy and design to working in the machine shop for hours at a time. This document will outline what I learned about designing, manufacturing, teamwork and time management. It will also outline what could possibly be improved in the course, and how I have used what I learn to improve as a student and engineer.

Designing and Manufacturing:

Before I entered this class, the only designing experience I had was being design editor of my school newspaper, and I had absolutely no machining experience. Furthermore, I had never used (nor heard of) a mill, lathe, or band saw. Simply put, the training sessions for the course terrified me, and I thought I was going to fail the class because other people knew a lot more than me.

Therefore, everything I have learned about designing and manufacturing has come from this course. In terms of designing, I learned the importance of having a clearly defined goal in mind, as well as the importance of drawing out sketches to help explain concepts. The reason for this is because my team member who was mainly in charge of the Solidworks model had to re-design the machine multiple times, simply because we changed simple components to improve our machine. Had we spent more time planning every specific aspect of the design, it would have saved us all a lot of time.

Teamwork and Time Management:

I truly pride myself on being a good team member and managing my time well, and I did so before this course as well. Still, this course improved my ability to work cohesively with a team, and definitely took a large chunk of my time this semester. In terms of working with a team, this is most I have ever worked with a class-assigned team on a project thus far into my college career. While I have worked on teams in courses such as engineering 100 and marketing 300, I usually tried to divide the work up at team meetings and then finish my tasks on my own. However, in this course, we always had to work together to solve problems and create the best design possible, and therefore, I hardly ever worked alone on ME 250 assignments.

In terms of time management, everyone on our team was fortunate enough to not have class before noon on Tuesdays and Thursdays (once lecture ended). Therefore, we spent nearly every Tuesday and Thursday from 8am-12pm in the machine shop for the past four weeks, in addition to some Mondays. Personally, I have a lot of commitments outside of my coursework, and was not able to work in the afternoons. Therefore, I had to dedicate a lot of early mornings to ME 250.

Improvements for the Course:

I thought this class was organized quite well. Still, I have two key suggestions. First, I think the initial stages of the course take a bit too long, and there is not enough time for manufacturing. Given the stages of the design process, where you initially start with different strategies, concepts, modules and components, students sometimes get too ambitious with their designs. They forget to realize that there isn’t enough time to actually manufacture these designs. Therefore, my team was at a large advantage because of the simplicity of our design, which worked out well for us, but was slightly unfair to other students.

Also, I think the material for the exam is a little excessive. Personally, I think there should be a more concise study guide where students are required to memorize 20-30 vocabulary words, so you don’t have to look through 16 lectures and guess about which vocabulary words might come up on the exam. However, I thought the other parts of this year’s exam was much more achievable than the practice exam we were given.

Conclusion:

Overall, I do not believe I could have improved my performance in this course. Our machine ranked first in the bracket and placed second in the actual competition, and therefore, I think we were more than successful. Therefore, I will conclude with how this course has benefited me as a student and engineer.

In addition to being in the engineering school, I am also in the Ross School of Business. The reason I applied to RSB is because I did not believe I would enjoy being a “true engineer” for the rest of my life. However, this course has made me reconsider. I absolutely loved designing our machine and manufacturing it, and this project has made me contemplate possibly being a designer as a career. I think it would be awesome to design cars for GM or design oilrigs for BP, so I will definitely look more into a more engineering-related internship this summer. Additionally, I look forward to ME 350 and 450, which will hopefully be as successful as my experience in this course!