Overall, ME250 was an intensive introduction to manufacturing and design of a relatively simple machine with a difficult task. This project was much more complicated than anything I have ever built before and because of that, I sometimes felt that I was put in over my head. But on the other hand, because of the large quantity of hard work and large quantity of material that we learned, it gave me a much better understanding of mechanical engineering and the manufacturing and design process. I also think taking a class like this is important to give you an idea of what is involved in some types of mechanical engineering. I have taken classes in CAD before, but this time it was very interesting to actually see the final product after it was designed on the computer. I also have always been interested in design and manufacturing and after taking this class, I hope to make it my specialization within mechanical engineering.
For the most part, my group worked really well together. Everyone worked very hard and we all were good at different parts of the project, so when we came together, we were able to get everything done. This is one of my many engineering classes that require teamwork, so all members of my team had teamwork experience which was useful. We had to make many compromises when one group member had a different idea than another group member of how a task should be accomplished. We all knew we had an ambitious project with many parts and therefore understood that we had a lot of work ahead of us for the semester. To accomplish the amount that we did in the past three months, we all had to have very good time management skills. We started early, when there were very few other teams in the shop. This was helpful because we got more individual attention when asking for advice about how to build our project and when machining the parts. We had out machine completely assembled on the Friday before it was due so we could practice using it and many any small changes necessary. We also had many meetings on the weekends to discuss what we were going to be doing next week, what changes needed to be made in the design, and when we all were going to be available to work on it. This way we could get right to work when we got to the shop during the week and we were all on the same page.
Through the lectures, I was able to learn a lot about the parts and how they were used. I was also able to learn about the design process and how to use it. I wish we could have known our project rules and materials earlier in the semester. It was hard to learn the design process when it the idea was so broad because normally there are a lot of constraints when designing a project so it felt like the entire first couple milestones were not very helpful. This way we could have starting getting reasonable ideas earlier in the semester. The lectures covered a large amount of material in a short amount of time. The CAD classes also would have been very fast for anyone that had never taken a CAD class before. I think because so much material was covered, we were not able to get as in depth on some topics as I felt we should have unless we did extra work outside of class to learn more about it. The homework often did not relate directly to the lectures and often took a long time on top of working on the project because it involved a lot of outside knowledge. I did like though being able to learn about the equipment in lecture first then being able to use it. It allowed me to use what I had learned in class towards the project which really reinforced the concepts.
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