Kyle Boyle- Individual Reflection

Individual Reflection- Kyle Boyle

Mechanical Engineering 250 was an extremely hard class for me. I had never really done anything similar to what we did in class before. While I understood most of what was going on in lecture and it seemed interesting to me, it ended up being a lot more difficult and time consuming than I thought. That being said, the class ended up teaching me a lot in areas that I did not expect.

The lectures for me were for the most part interesting. However, a lot of the time I would either think that the material was either really simple of really complicating. It seemed like there was too much information on how to design something and not enough on how to actually manufacture it.

The homework was the hardest part of the class for me. I could see the relevance to what we are doing in the class, but I think it would have been really helpful if the homework was connected to the lectures somehow. I understand recitation was to fill that void, but it is not part of the required 4 credit class and sometimes our schedule does not allow us to attend.

An area I learned a lot about in this class is teamwork, both good and bad. I know at sometimes my team, including me, could have been a lot better. I learned that organization is key when working with a team. You have to set ahead of time who is doing what, when they are doing it, and how they are doing it.

The area I learned the most in in this class is time management. There were times throughout the class when I was really stressed out mostly because of the amount of time I had to finish it. Like I said before, I have never done this type of project before so I was in for a rude awakening. I usually assume things would take shorter than they really did which was a mistake on my part because really I had no idea. Things like drilling a simple hole or mounting a simple axis surprised me on how difficult and time consuming it really was. This is where I feel it would have been helpful in lecture to give a more descriptive detail on how the manufacturing processes were going to happen. How long, with what machines and alternatives, what could go wrong, etc. I also learned that when making your machine you had to plan on something to go wrong. Every day, it was something wrong in your plan, something you did not account for, a wrong manufacturing method, or something as simple as a machine being taken and you have nothing else to do but sit there and wait. And you were always at the mercy of the machine shop hours considering that nobody really has tools at their dorm or apartment.

While I do think some things in the class could have been improved, I do think I could have dealt with the class a lot better than I did. I feel like I could have planned ahead a lot more and went in the machine shop early so I knew what I was doing. Also, I wish that I could have made it to more of the recitations for the homework.