Jae Yong's Reflection

Before coming to ME 250, I did not have any experience with manufacturing apart from making mini-cars and model airplanes. Therefore, when I first came to the lecture and heard that students are supposed to design a machine that will move the balls to the opposite side, I became totally blunt and wondered if I could successfully complete this course.

It seemed impossible at first. Howeve, as the professor, GSIs and machine shop directors taught each step of the designing process, I could slowly design my ultimate machine and manufacture it.

Learning CAD, different manufacturing processes such as lathe, mill, drilling, waterjet, laser cut and etc have been essential for our team to manufacutre our machine. Fortunately, our team members had different strengths and weaknesses so that each one of us could contribute to the achine efficiently. I have spent major time doing engineering analysis. I contributed in manufacturing process, mainly on lathe. I also did revisions of our manufacturing process, and analyzed possible failures and ways to fix them.

I could have been better at time management. Frankly speaking, much of our machine has been manufactured just few days before the deadline. I was ended up working 9AM from morning to 7PM on Friday just before the deadline, and the team got really nervous due to shortage of time. Luckily, we manufactured our machine successfully on time, but I hope this would not happen again in future.

Although I cannot say that I have mastered CAD and manufacturing processes, I have now become more or less acquainted with overall manufacturing. I am sure that this class helped me to prepare for other design and manufacturing classes that I will be taking in the near future.

I know that ME 250 has been changed a lot in this semester. When I heard from upperclassmen, ME 250 used to be an "easy A" class, so I did not worry about this class as much as other ME classes. However, this class has been most demanding (in terms of time consumption, workload, concept and etc) this semester for me. Especially, some of the homeworks were rather vague and complex at the same time, and I had some problem doing it, even with GSI's help.

If I were taking "only" ME 250 class, I would think that the time consumption and workload are
understandable. However, with two more ME classes, this class has been very challenging.

I know that world is full of obstacles and challenges. I believe this course has given me valuable hand-on experiences in design and manufacturing. Furthermore, I learned how to work in team better. We had good and bad times, as people cannot always be happy or sad. We tried to resolve any conflicts and we successfully manufactured the machine. I was really happy when our machine did so well in seeding competition, and was sad when we lost in the first round. Before manufacturing, I was rather skeptical about our machine, but as time passed by I became so into the machine, and was so proud of it at the end.

I would like to thank Professor John Hart for redesigning this course to be more helpful for students, GSIs (especially Sei-Jin) for endless helpful advises, and all our team members who are so talented and passionate about this course.