Max's Reflection

If I were to evaluate myself, I would start by stating that something that factors into both my strengths and weaknesses is my strong sense of dedication and urgency. I always want to finish things and do them right, and this showed in basically every assignment that we had in this class. It allows me to focus on the topic on hand, and this has helped me through an ample amount of assignments. However, this makes it extremely difficult for me to switch off of an assignment that I have not finished. I always feel the need to work on assignments until they are completed, and quite often, this is not an efficient way of working. It helps to walk away from something that you’re working on, but I have trouble with this.

 

Another strength that I have is that I am a completionist in the sense that I need to understand the work that I am doing. It is hard for me to just take information or equations as what they are and assume they are correct. I always want to understand them on a more fundamental level, and this requires much more time than just finding an answer and moving on to the next assignment. I have found that this has helped me build a stronger foundation for many topics because before I even begin to create a solution, I try to amass a strong amount of knowledge that I have confidence in not only what the question is asking, but the surrounding topics as well.

 

Finally, a weakness of mine is that I am extremely competitive, and while this can help me in a lot of situations where I need motivation to accomplish something, I absolutely find that I am frustrated with how competitive I am more than thankful. I feel that the competitive side in me prohibits me from gaining as much as I can from an assignment, and I am often too concerned with getting the best score to actually pay attention to the content that I am learning. I have legitimately found that this has been a major obstacle for me when I am working on assignments, and this is most definitely something I want to improve upon.

 

In terms of what I learned in this class, I genuinely did feel that I learned a great deal about manufacturing processes. Going into this class, I knew very little about any sort of manufacturing, and possibly knew a little about 3D printing, but that was it. However, leaving this class, I feel that I have picked up more than I could have asked for, and this has made me more comfortable within the realm of mechanical engineering. In specific, for 3D printing I remember how we discussed each type of additive manufacturing and how different ones are rooted in different ideas and technologies, yet they all accomplish the same thing. I felt that visual cues and actually seeing images and videos of each and every process helped cement them in my head. A major takeaway from machining for me was the process of cutting on a lathe, and I believe that this is something I was able to retain so well because we also saw this physical process in lab. Another main concept that I learned in this course were stress-strain curves and what they represented as well as the different points on them. I believe that I had success learning this because quite simply it was one of the parts of the course that I found a great amount of interest in, and it was something that was fascinating to me which made me want to learn about them. From casting and molds, a major idea I left with was the importance of freezing, and this is because we analyzed several graphs and plots that showed values such as Tsolidus and Tliquidus, and I felt that we went more in depth on these principles which to me, showed that they were important and needed to be remembered. Tolerances was another major idea that I learned because we covered these a lot in ME170, and I did not really understand the intricacies of them in that course, so I hoped to cover them more in this class. Once again, for plastics, I thought that the different types of plastics and how they cooled was fascinating, so this naturally made it easier to learn. Design of experimentation was not too complex, so this was fairly easy to comprehend for me. I do not recall a great deal from welding, possibly because we did not cover it for too long, but I partially recall what we discussed about the strength of the HAZ and the overall material strength. Finally, design for assembly was easy to pick up on because we had covered it in lab before, so there was pre-existing knowledge going in to when we learned it in lecture.

 

A highlight of this course is definitely the main project because I feel that this is one of the best ways to get to know people in your department, invest yourself in your major, and simulate real-world working environments. I think it is a mainstay of mechanical engineering, and I love the design aspect of the project and the flexibility that is given to us. A major challenge for me from this class was setting ourselves up at the beginning of the group project to make sure that we have a stable semester that allows us to make tangible progress. We picked a product that was difficult for us to work with, and I felt that this inhibited our ideation and choices for what we wanted to change. Another major highlight for me was feeling more involved in mechanical engineering as a department through this class. I felt going in that this was a staple of our department, and working through it made me feel like a part of mechanical engineering. However, a challenge that accompanied this for me was that I wanted to gain more experience with CAD modeling and designing physical systems because I felt weak in this regard, and we began the main project too soon that I still felt that I did not know enough about how to properly design and create things in CAD.

 

Many of the topics we covered in ME270 are directly relatable to real-world applications in that we covered several extremely popular and significant manufacturing processes that are used all over the world to create the products that we use every day. I see these topics in every product that I look at from knock-out pin marks on toys to runner marks on water bottles and so forth. The evidence of the ideas that we learned about are all around us, and I feel that this class allowed us to see that. Also, the accompanying main project was an excellent simulation of what many large real-world projects look like and the dynamic that they take form in. You are almost always working in a team as an adult, so it is critical to grow those skills now.