Individual Reflection - Joe

It seems like the purpose of ME 250 is to immerse you in various aspects of engineering to teach you a lot really fast, and I feel like that happened.

Prior to this class I had no experience in design nor manufacturing. I've worked on teams before obviously but this was only my second experience with an engineering team project.

As far as designing, I learned about the nuts and bolts of designing, i.e. how to sketch and then draw your designs by hand, how to model them using computer software. I also learned that you should try to keep designs simple, which I'll talk about more later. I learned the process of designing a product, from start to finish. The whole idea of starting with broad ideas and narrowing down to concepts, modules, etc. I'm glad that this was taught so clearly because I know somebody who bombed a job interview when he answered a question wrong about the process of designing a product.

Manufacturing, obviously I learned how to use all of the machines in the shop and create parts within tolerances. I learned about trying to think of ways to design parts for manufacturability to. This is one benefit of doing both things back to back in one class. If you design a part that's hard to make, you realize right away because YOU have to make it. Then you learn from it and adjust next time.

For team work, I learned that it's best to create rigid meeting times and plan things specifically. We're all pretty busy now and that was one of the biggest hurdles to get over. Once we set up a specific meeting time and used that to plan, we had a lot more success. For time management, I don't think any of us realized how much time it would take for a project of this magnitude. Now that we've done this and made a lot of mistakes, we'll be more prepared for the next project like this.

As far as how the course could be improved, I feel like immersing everyone in Design and Manufacturing at the same time might have some drawbacks. I learned a lot but I can tell a lot of small details didn't sink in, e.g. which precedence of lines, holes sizing, etc. This might have already been taken into consideration but I wanted to raise the point anyway. 

Additionally, I think that the class time commitment isn't apparent from the beginning. None of us were ready for how much work this required, it's much more than any other 4 credit class. I was talking to someone in another group and she and I both said we skipped a lot of classes throughout the semester to make meetings for ME 250 milestones, and even more towards the end of the semester, and that didn't really seem fair.

Finally, the Milestone deadlines should be changed. It felt like we were on track for the first few (MCM, 3 manufactured parts, all engineering), but then all of the sudden we needed to have our machine 90% done and it was a total scramble. I think if the process of designing the vehicle starts a little earlier, and there would be more time between the 3 parts deadline and 90%. Or the earlier deadlines should ask for more to be done earlier.

There are two big ways that I think our team could have done better in class. One is trying to trim some of the fat out of our design. Mark and Bob in the shop commented that it seemed like we had a lot of parts compared to other groups, and I started to realize that as well. If we had tried to design a body that consisted of fewer parts, we would have finished sooner. Since we had so many things, our design was delayed because we had to build parts, check for compatibility, then finalize designs for other parts and make them. It would have helped to pick a simpler strategy too. The other thing was time management, we should have started making concrete plans a lot sooner and gotten parts made sooner.