Individual Reflection: Meghan Wright

Well finally this class has come to a close and overall I would say that I feel quite good about it. Throughout the course I feel I have gained a solid understanding of the design process from end to beginning, the main idea I took out of all of this is that you need to be incredibly thorough throughout the entire process and not just jump to the end and focus everything on the final product. The rough ideas you begin the process with really shape the final outcome of your whole design as much as it may not seem like it when you first start. It seemed in the beginning of the semester that all of the simplistic ideas we were asked to come up with were just busy work, but I can look back now and see that those ideas, however rough they were, became a solid basis for the rest of our more extravagant ideas to build off of, ultimately leaving us with a reasonably successful and somewhat well thought out design.

When it comes to manufacturing I’ve learned first and foremost just how much time you really need to commit to this process in order to get an end product that you are happy with and more importantly one that actually works as you intended. As a team we spent a lot of time in the shop trying to quickly and properly learn how to use the different machines and also a lot of time in the classroom trying to figure out just how exactly to constrain everything so that our machine could maybe run smoothly. I also really value having learned so much CAD, which I feel will be a reoccurring skill in my life. This tool is so incredibly useful throughout the design process and while I wish I had learned even more about it, thanks to this class I feel I have a strong enough basic understanding of CAD that I can continue to teach myself on my own time and apply this knowledge in other classes.

Throughout the rest of my college career and well after that I am sure teamwork will be a recurring thing in my life. I am glad to have been lucky enough to be a part of a team that worked very well together, but due to this it was hard to keep focused at times when we needed to stay on task and accomplish things in an allotted amount of time. Having no one on the team with any machining or CAD experience became an apparent issue as we progressed, I feel throughout the term different members strengthened different skills that we could put to use making us work more efficiently than if we all had minimal understanding of a broad range of skills. Monopolizing on these abilities we were able to accomplish more and complete our tasks on time. Even though we didn’t do as well as we had hoped I think we all gained a lot from this class and had an enjoyable time doing so.

One of the biggest issues with this class seemed to me to be how vague all of our different instructions were. It seemed at times that the class was rather unorganized making it difficult for the students to accomplish the different assignments as they were expected to because they were unsure of what was being asked of them. Last minute e-mails were inevitably being sent out in attempts to clear the air on specific topics and then we would have a few days to a few hours notice to attempt to figure out how to change things around to fit the expected results. I feel if the entire course (more specifically: rules of the game, milestones, shop times etc.) were planned out more concretely before the start of the term then there would be less confusion for all, students and teachers alike, to have to deal with.

As for my personal performance, I feel I could have spent more time outside of class thinking of better ways to improve our original design and planning out in more detail what exactly needed to be accomplished. Had I focused more on this class I feel I could have accomplished a lot more and I would have taken even more than I have out of the class. Overall I feel that this was a great learning experience and I enjoyed my time spent on this class.