Julius Roberts' Reflection

I started out the semester second guessing my choice of mechanical engineering. After the first couple weeks of ME 250, I was strongly second guessing my choice of mechanical engineering with the thoughts of, “what am I getting myself into?” As time passed on, my original views began to evolve. This wasn’t until I began to think creatively. But thinking creatively came with some challenges. These challenges lied in the fact that all the material presented in lecture was completely brand new. I had little to no prior knowledge of things such as linkages, gear trains, bushings and bearings, etc. Some of the material sounded familiar but I had little to zero knowledge of the purpose or function. Based on these facts I was very nervous and discouraged about building a machine that made up for most of my grade.

One philosopher stated the mind is a blank a slate and can be molded into anything, well in my case this was true. As stated before, I knew next to nothing about the material in this course, from the purpose of a rack and pinion to how to work a lathe. The course demands a great amount of time and effort. In my opinion, the course should be worth more credits than 4 for how much time out of the classroom is required but this is beyond the point. Starting out with a blank slate it is hard to narrow down exactly what I learned but I’d have to say the most valuable chunk of material I took away from this class is the design process in general. The most important portion of this class is to take a simple idea of collect balls and think of various ways this task can be accomplished. Then, pick one way and think of different ways of how that one way can work and on down the list of the process. In my opinion, the goal of the class is not to see how well you can manufacture a part or how well you can put together a gear box; rather it teaches you to accomplish the desired time-based checkpoints throughout the process.

Growing up I played team sports so naturally I was excited about being part of a team again. I know from experience that teams typically don’t function well if there is any part of the team that does not hold up their own portion of the work. Luckily, in my case this didn’t happen. Our team was pretty well split up in our own special skill sets and all with the same common goal of succeeding. The only problem we encountered within our team was time lost. Our team got along very well and often found ourselves becoming sidetracked, but there was always one of us who pulled the rest of the group off the tangent of Michigan football or quoting a movie. This never affected our overall time schedule, we just found ourselves spending a little extra time on a task for the day. Even though this particular course demanded a lot of work outside the classroom it was a great experience to be responsible for more than just myself but for three others.

In every system there are going to be some flaws especially if that system is on its second walk-thru. If I could only change one thing in this course it would have to be the time schedule of assembling groups. Looking back at it, the individual work done during the first half of the semester was a good experience of thinking critically on your own but was definitely challenging when you didn’t know how things would work. Assembling groups early on would eliminate this confusion by allowing team members to brainstorm ideas together. But that is not the only reason I would move up the date of putting groups together. The second reason is allowing more shop time to be available. If groups are assembled two weeks earlier that means each group has two more weeks to manufacture parts in the shop. During crunch time (the last week of the class) we found it very difficult to access machines. This caused imperfections on some of parts by having to use machines that had greater tolerances. Also, we found ourselves in the lab/shop from morning to evening. This caused stress not only in ME 250 but also in our other courses that had to be neglected. Being able to spread out the manufacturing time would benefit the students immensely.

One way I could have improved my experience in this course is to not rely on my teammates so much on certain aspects of the project. If the time schedule to manufacture wasn’t so tight I would have tried to use the mill but since we didn’t have time to waste two of my teammates mastered the mill while I found myself and another of one of my teammates working solely on the lathe. This would have helped on the examination in putting together the manufacturing plan.