Daniel Ostrowski's Reflection

Over the last semester, this ME 250 class was very challenging, but very rewarding at the same time. I learned a lot about the design and manufacturing process in addition to honing my teamwork and time management skills in a design project that was much like a real world situation.

The most important thing that I will take away from this class is how engineering/design interacts with the manufacturing process. I learned (through my own mistakes) that it is very important and much more efficient to spend more time on designing correctly than it is to manufacture a part and then later realize that it needs to be modified. I also learned (again through experience) that it is absolutely imperative that a designer makes clear, concise engineering drawings in order to expedite the manufacturing process.

In addition to the design process, I also learned a great deal about the precision manufacturing processes involved in machining. Before this class I didn’t even know that laser cutters and water jet cutters existed; now I know how to use both quite well. Learning more about the limitations and capabilities of other manufacturing processes (such a milling and turning) will help me in the future, as a designer, to design things so they can be efficiently manufactured.

The design project portion of this class required a lot of team work and I learned some valuable lessons from the experiences of my team. First of all, working with others is always a challenge as you learn your teammates strengths and weaknesses and how to effectively communicate with them. Secondly, it was very difficult for four different people, with different lifestyles and schedules, to come up with times where we could all meet and work together. This led to an uneven distribution of workload, which put us too far behind schedule.

Falling behind schedule due to a lack of man hours spent on task caused our design to suffer in the end. Due to this poor time management, we had very little time left at the end for testing, redesigning, and improving. It also caused us to skimp on some aspects (particularly in the robustness and aesthetic areas of our design) in an effort to just get it finished in time for the contest. Looking back on our methods, there were several ways that we could have managed time better. In addition to designing parts correctly the first time, we could have been more decisive during our initial design phase. Several times during idea development, we wasted time by simply not being able to make a decision on things from the overall concept, to what materials and sizes to make our parts. On the other hand, I can cut us some slack since this was the first ever design (and manufacturing) class for all our team members. As long as we can learn from it and become better in the future, it was all worth it.

Speaking of being worth all the work, when we finally got our machine finished (though not perfected) it was a huge relief. It was very rewarding to see that all our hard work and time had gone into creating something that worked very closely to what we had planned.

As previously mentioned, this class was very rewarding but time consuming. Seeing as it is the first ever design course for most students, I was surprised by how rigorous it was. Several times I felt overwhelmed (especially on homework - maybe 211 and 240 should be prerequisites) but I got through it with help from the GSIs. Also, at times, I was very unsure about what exactly was expected from me (homework, exam), so in the future it may be good to be more specific on certain things. Even though I learned from having a tight schedule, I believe it may improve the overall class experience if there was more time for designing and actually working on the project (maybe choosing teams in the second week would help).

Overall, I enjoyed this class and did pretty well. I could still have improved my performance in the class by studying the lecture notes more than three days before the exam. Also, I really underestimated how hard the exam would be, but again, it was another learning experience.