Thus far in my mechanical engineering career here and the
University of Michigan, I found ME250 to be the one in which I learned the most
from taking, beyond just the topics which the course covered. In my personal opinion, I find it much easier
to learn when you are working towards some physical goal, in this case our
machine than I do in “problem” based courses or those with your weekly homework
assignment and three exams or what have you.
By having a goal to work towards, you get to see the forces and work and
the issues that can be created by lack of planning or incorrect work when
calculating forces for example. When it
comes to the actual course material, mainly design and manufacturing, I came
into this course pretty much completely clueless. I had never manufactured anything of any
degree of complexity. The first time I
had done anything even remotely similar was in my Eng 100 class my freshman
year, but that hardly compares to this or what will come in ME350 or
ME450. What I learned was that while the
design and manufacturing of a product can be extremely stressful and at times
difficult, but the reward you get from seeing the finished product is well
worth it. Along the same lines, the
evolution of your idea into a working physical object is extremely satisfying as
well. I also found working in the
machine shop to be a fantastic learning environment, by working on mostly the
mill in my case, I was able to see how the shape of a part would affect the
forces acting on our machine in both positive and negative ways and how a small
error when machining can lead to a much larger issue when it comes time to
assemble. Another big part of the class
was teamwork and time management and my group was one of the best I've had the
pleasure to work with. As far as
teamwork is concerned, I feel my group was all equally committed to the task at
hand and for this reason we were able to succeed. On the other hand, our time management, while
fairly good did result in us having to make some last minute adjustments that
probably could have been avoided had we began assembling our machine earlier. For example we were forced to cut the arm on
our machine smaller so we could no longer reach the red balls on the top of the
arena because the weight of the arm was more than the motor was able to handle
at its original length. Had we managed
our time a little better, we may have seen this issue earlier and been able to
come up with a more elegant solution to the problem that wouldn't have
completely changed our strategy. In the
end, encountering problems when manufacturing something is to be expect and can
be very enlightening, but depending on one’s time management these problems can
either be a chance to improve and expand on your idea or an issue that must be
dealt with in the easiest and most efficient way possible.
Overall,
I felt the class ran very smoothly, one area I experienced that could be
improved upon is the communication between GSI’s and the course instructors and
the machine shop. We ran into the issue
where we had planned and told our GSI about our plan on assembling part of our
machine, but when we went to do it, we discovered this was not possible even
though we had been lead to believe it was.
While I do not place the blame on our GSI in any way, as it mainly our
responsibility to make sure our design is good, I still feel more communication
would be good. Also the machine shop was
extremely crowded and there was a lack of machines for the number of groups
that needed to get on them especially towards the end of the class. Finally, I felt the exam did not represent
the work we had done so far in the class well at all and the exam review did little
to help with preparing us for the type of problems that would be on the exam. I could have improved my performance in the class by taking better notes and not
relying on the lecture slides on line as much as I did and asking for help
earlier in the machine shop than I
did. I felt like I was clueless the
first day I spent in the machine shop and because of self pride mostly I guess
I wasted time being too nervous and stubborn to ask for the help I needed. However, I did change my ways quickly and
enjoyed and learned much in the rest of the time I spent working in the shop.
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