Individual Reflection: Adam Olshove

From the very first assignment in this class, through all the homeworks, CAD assignments, and hours upon hours spent in the shop, my mindset was "This class is stupid." If anyone ever asked what I thought about the class, that is what I would tell them. It is only now that I am done with the class and I can look back on it that I realize just how much I've learned. I now regret having the mindset I had, because I feel I could have learned even more (and gotten a better grade) if I had taken the class with a more optimistic approach.

I think the most important thing I took from the class was all that I learned about mechanical design. All those lectures that I considered useless, well, I wish I had stayed awake during them. I remember a specific moment where I looked at a lecture slide that had something to do with constraining, and thinking "Seriously? This theoretical stuff is never going to apply to our machine." And I also remember the oh-crap moment when I realized an entire module of our machine was not going to work because it was improperly and inadequately constrained. This leads me to a very important thought I had the other day: If I could go back and design this project again, I could make it twice as effective twice as fast. That is how I know that I learned a lot in this class. And I can't even tell myself that the things I learned about mechanical design will never come up in my life because they already have: I had to build two cages out of carbonfiber and acrylic for my UROP project and had to consider so many of the things we covered in this class in their designs.

Another thing I am glad to take from this class is the experience I got in Solidworks. I have already had to use it outside of the classroom and again it was for my UROP project. CAD was one of the things that I never had a major complaint about in this class, but while I was working on the assignments I did think that they were a bit tedious and unnecessary. I take these thoughts back now, because I have come to realize what a powerful and useful tool CAD is, especially in mechanical engineering. I genuinely enjoy using Solidworks now, sometimes I even sit down and build solid models of random things just for fun.

As far as teamwork and time management go, I guess I learned a lot, but it wasn't something that occurred to me while I was learning it. One thing in particular that I can say I learned is that when it comes to machining it will ALWAYS take longer than you expect it to. More importantly, I learned that it is very useful to know exactly what the specific skills of each individual team member are in advance. While some things are meant to be worked on by more than one person, it is sometimes just more time efficient to split things up among a group. This is when it is vital to assign the correct things to the correct person.

To improve this course, the number one thing would be to make it less vague. Most of the vagueness in the class was probably as a result of it having such a new curriculum. But sometimes the vagueness seemed ridiculous. On every single assignment I or my group found ourselves saying "What is this even asking us to do?" and the resources we need to complete assignments were often absent or would be provided very shortly before a deadline. And there were too many emails saying "Oh by the way..." that described some tasks for us to do a day or two before a milestone was due. However, I feel that these problems will be mostly resolved next semester having seen how the class took its course this semester.

To improve my own performance in this course, I should have taken it more seriously. At the end I DID take it pretty seriously, but it was a little late. Before then I treated it more like engin 100, where I didn't learn anything. There was very much to be learned from this class and I wish I had realized that.