Overall, I believe that ME 250 was a great experience, and although it was a very tough and time consuming class, the knowledge that I learned from this class was very vast, and will be useful for both the rest of my college career and my job career. As a mechanical engineer, this class was our first design and manufacturing class as a mechanical engineer, so it forced us to think in ways that most of us had never been required to. This class had no textbook, so it required us to engage our brain in ways that we rarely do. The course required us to problem solve, and use prior knowledge from engineering, physics and calculus courses in order to solve difficult engineering problems. Personally, this course helped me to decide that mechanical engineering is the track that I want to continue to pursue.
I truly enjoyed working in groups for this project, and working towards a goal that, individually, none of us could have accomplished. I was quite satisfied with my team, and using each other to bounce ideas, and building a complex slotbot machine in the machine shop. Although all of us knew how to use all of the machines, each of us became especially experienced in one or two machines so that we could accomplish better time management and efficiency in the project.
The designing of the slotbots in teams was quite enjoyable, although it was quite stressful when other classes had to be neglected, because ME 250 was so time consuming. I believe that with better time management in the future courses, namely ME 350, 395, 450 and 495, though, most of us would not need to neglect other courses however. The class, in itself though, was also quite a challenge to manage, and I believe that this class also taught time management better than any class in the LS&A department could. Despite the fact that we were putting in some 40 hour weeks, it seemed like we were scraping by just to meet the deadlines. All of us in our group, underestimated how long building a slotbot machine would actually take, and that made this class especially difficult.
In addition to the course teaching me to work well in groups and time management, job skills that will translate to virtually any career, the course also allowed me to become proficient in CAD, become a more experienced machinist, and learn all about gears, pulleys, bearings, etc. The course had a vast amount of information that all us had to intake, and this made the examination in this class the most difficult one I had taken this year. I believe that I am fairly experienced now, though, in this wide array of topics that ME 250 has taught me, and hopefully all of this hard work in this course will make ME 350 and 450 that much easier because I do not have to take the time to learn the basics that ME 250 has done so well in teaching.
As stated above, I believe that overall this course was very good in teaching the student about basic mechanical engineering. The only thing that I believe should be changed in this course is the grading. The course never had any sort of syllabus that informed us about how this course would be graded, what it would be curved to or anything of the sort, and it has made me very frustrated to not know how my performance in this class would translate into a grade. Also, I do not think that the grading for the homework assignment was always fair, and I think that it would be a good idea that at the beginning of the homework assignments to explain to the whole class what the professors are looking for to distinguish an A from a B student.
I am relatively satisfied with how I performed in this class, but I believe that time management is the key to this class. For future courses, such as ME 350 and 450, I will be certain that our group tries to make our deadlines much sooner, and at the very beginning of the year, I think that it would be a good idea for everyone to lay out their exam dates on a calendar, so our group can plan accordingly and work around these busier times. Besides time management, though, I believe that my team’s performance was very good, and I hope that my future design and manufacturing courses will be as informative and enjoyable as this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment