Ok first of all I want to say Congratulations to ME 250 students!! We all did it!! Now Kudos to every member of “The Chosen Ones” for sticking together despite all the ups and down we have faced. Next, thanks to all the GSIs and support staff for all the help in manufacturing slotbots. Thanks to Dr. John Hart and Mike Umbriac for a very, very tough and challenging yet exceptionally educational curriculum and for all the memories.
Looking back to the semester I not only feel relieved and skilled, I also feel a little sad and a little disappointed too. I am sad because the time and effort our team had put in our modules did not come around to help us during the competition. Due to time restrictions and nervousness we just couldn’t able to setup our slotbot properly during competition and paid the price.
Although I am little disappointed with our team results I am extremely grateful for the time I spent in this class. I am happy that my team actually designed and built something for the first time by using the principles we have learned in previous classes. I am happy with hands on experience I had building the slotbot and I happy that I had a chance to work with immensely talented and creative members of my team.
Working with three other people is always challenging and if members don’t have the right chemistry than it’s always hard to have everybody contribute to their full potential. Although we didn’t have these issues and we hit it off from the beginning, the time management became a great issue in our team. We all tried to work as much as we can on our modules and I want to praise other three members for sacrificing everything, from sleep to lectures, to work on our slotbot. Even though we were spending lot of time and energy on the project, our inexperience, coupled with all the bad luck always caused us short of time but somehow we always managed to get away with it. Unfortunately, the final days the luck just left us hanging in the middle and we just couldn’t able to avoid making small human and set-up errors and those small errors cost us in the competition.
With the design competition and a exam, this class challenged us at all levels. Although the designing and manufacturing curriculum was greatly set up it’s the in-class curriculum I didn’t found up to the mark. The lectures were not that helpful in terms of their relation with manufacturing part of the class. Also it seemed like we were tested on our speed in creativity rather than creativity. The nature of the exam, with all the sketches and details, in a limited time put a great deal of pressure and it was something that affected my creativeness.
In the end, I once again thank everybody for their help and support. And finally I just want to say that if I had to take this class our again I would either get on top of time management issues or wait for a time machine.
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