Ayrah's Reflection

As an overall evaluation of myself, although I am a very dedicated worker, some factors did arise that affected my ability to work cohesively with my team. Especially as a team of five, it can be very difficult to have in-person group meetings - until our lab section ended, we never had a consistent time to meet up. We remedied this issue through transparency; the people who could meet up would update the GroupMe so all members were fully aware of the new progress. My personal schedule lacked almost any suitable free time during the day and more often than not I opted for working remotely or very late at night. I also could’ve have tried to work on assignments over time rather than trying to complete something in one sitting. While some assignments required extended research to find a particular answer, I could have skimmed questions over earlier in the week to avoid scrambling to find the answer the night before or day of.

 

A strength I have as a team member is communication and transparency. No team is perfect and no team lacks weaknesses. I am very comfortable to reach out for help in sections I’m not well-versed in and acknowledge that as busy students, all of us have our own particular responsibilities outside of this class. If I feel like I haven’t dedicated enough effort into one assignment, I keep myself accountable in giving myself more work or allocating less desirable/more difficult sections in future assignments.

 

I felt somewhat overwhelmed and stretched thin over a large variety of topics. At times, scouring article after article became frustrating to find small pieces of information - and with the large amount of content in the group assignments, it seemed each team member would only retain a portion of the overarching concept of the assignment (as it would be divided up into sections to prepare an answer for) and I lost a full grasp of the lesson. I felt a stronger need to fulfill a requirement and get a good grade rather than taking the time to divulge in the smaller topics I was working with and find academic achievement in that, rather than striving to maximize points.

 

I enjoyed working on our semester-long project - it was an interesting change from ME 170, now choosing to focus on a redesign on a specific product, rather than imagining and implementing a completely new one. Plenty of lab classes fostered strong discussion and learning in terms of team dynamic and how mechanical engineering concepts would directly affect real world applications. Over the course of this semester, I definitely gained a lot of applicable knowledge. I have a much stronger and broader understanding of the manufacturing process, especially from my starting point of basic knowledge from ME 170 and some limited understanding of 3D-printing. It was interesting to learn about subtractive and additive manufacturing, the subcategories, and the different planning aspects to efficiently manufacture a product. Furthermore, the labs also gave great visual into such manufacturing processes like lathe machining to casting and molds. Even more so, some of the smaller details such as tolerances, covered in ME 170, were better explained. Learning about the different properties and applications of plastics, especially thermoplastics, was also incredibly interesting.