Final Reflection-Lauren

As a transfer student from Spelman College in Atlanta I had taken courses on Engineering Design but I never had the opportunity to actually design any of the things we thought up. This course reminded me why I made the decision to transfer to the University of Michigan. The amount of resources this school has to offer was very well demonstrated within the requirements of this course. This course taught me how to apply many things I learned in the past and that I actually have the skills to become a Mechanical Engineer.

I had experienced working in groups before in the past but never on a project as demanding as this. Our team was a diverse group of people, including Annie a Chemical Engineering major. We all lived on different parts of campus and had conflicting class schedules but somehow we made it all work to create a working machine. Working on a team is often difficult when people have different ideas of how things should be done but we didn’t have many problems with that. I was also grateful to be on an understanding team. In the middle of manufacturing of our machine I came down with the flu and couldn’t be involved in much of the building, my team was very understanding of that fact and accepted the work I did before I was sick and after I returned. This experience involved a lot of sacrifice and at times truly tested my commitment to the class. At the end I feel I learned to appreciate what each person brought to the table and I also got a chance to get to know three people I probably wouldn’t have met otherwise.

The amount of assignments early on in the course was a good preparation for the time I would have to put into creating the machine. Time management wasn’t really an issue with us as a team because all of us had the same mindset of trying to finish the machine and each group assignment as early as possible. I am taking four engineering classes this semester and this one probably took up most of my time. I have to admit it wasn’t an easy thing to do but once we started working on it, everything fell into place.

From what I’ve heard from former ME 250 students this course was already a great improvement from semesters past, however it was not perfect. The lectures covered a lot of material that was relevant to many machines but often times it was too much material given at one time which made it difficult to understand. I also appreciate the fact that we had to do physics calculations before we built our machines; however some of the physics knowledge expected of us in homework and on the exam was more than the prerequisites provided. I could have improved my performance in this class by devoting more time to it in the beginning instead of just trying to get assignments out of the way.