Yeon-Soo's Reflection

Being a broad field, mechanical engineering consists of many sub-fields such as thermal sciences, solid and fluid mechanics, nanotechnology, and so on. As a student of mechanical engineering, I was not very interested in the manufacturing aspect of the field, and I came into ME250 hoping that I would still find the class enjoyable.

It did not take long for me realize how much time and effort this class would require of me, and although I was looking forward to our final product, the journey of reaching that point was a hard one. Having nearly completed this journey, I can say that I did learn a great deal from this course. First of all, I had always wanted to learn CAD, and I now feel quite experienced with SolidWorks. The CAD assignments helped me a lot (after spending many hours on some of them) and I also volunteered to be the member of my team who would do most of the CAD portion of manufacturing. From lecture, I learned more about the theory and mechanisms behind screws, bearings, and springs, among many, than I ever imagined. Also, my experience in the machine shop was a positive one. A regret that I have is that I did not get to spend too much time with the lathe, but hopefully I’ll get to use it more in ME350 or in my own time outside of class. I used the mill a lot, and I gained experience with the water jet and the laser cutter; all of which I will see again in my subsequent design classes.

Team work and time management were two other very important skill sets that I improved in this class. I was lucky to have found a group of members who, despite our busy schedules, were able to meet and work towards each milestone and homework to completion. Each milestone and homework required a distribution of work among the team members, and the fact that how I do my part determines the grade of three other people in addition to me helped me to work even harder in this course. It was also interesting to see what strengths and weaknesses each of us had; some of us were more efficient workers in the machine shop than others, some were better at CAD than others, and some of us have taken more engineering classes than others, which helped us do calculations and analyses necessary for some of the milestones. I am not sure about my teammates, but I can speak for myself that my time management could have been better. There were times when I missed other classes to work on our machine, and I am sure that there were measures I could have taken to prevent that. I will learn from and try to improve upon all of these mistakes when I take more demanding manufacturing courses (i.e. ME350 and ME450).

I am aware that ME250 went through some major changes before this term, and a lot of work went into this course from both the students and the staff leading it. I felt that some of the homework assignments could be improved for future courses. In particular, assignments 2 and 3 were unnecessarily difficult and required us to make assumptions that I’m not sure I would have been able to make had I not gone to office hours. In the beginning of the course, there was also confusion about the difference between strategies, concepts, and modules that I feel can easily be avoided next time. I could have improved my performance in this course by reviewing lecture notes more often, by coming into early morning machine shop hours more often, and coming into more office hours for some of the CAD and homework assignments.

In retrospect, I definitely will take things from ME250 that will help me in my future. I gained an interest in control engineering from this class and I look forward to taking ME360 next term. Although we lost in the first round, I am proud of the final product we built and my other accomplishments from the class.

Yeon-Soo Chung