[245-257] I really enjoyed my classes in the fall. We built a robot, and we built a catapult completely from scratch to our specifications. In the spring, we got into specifically mechanical engineering. I had an intro to mechanical engineering course, and we did six weeks in the computer lab and six weeks in the machine shop where we designed, fabricated and assembled a soft blow hammer and a tumbler. It’s a plastic block with a metal swing arm on it and you can you just crank it endlessly; it’s like a little toy. That was to teach us how to deal with tolerance, to get pieces to fit together. They also, in the catapult project, put us into groups because the purpose of engineering is to learn to work in a group as well as doing things on your own. So, those definitely satisfied that curiosity of saying, “How can I make this machine make a piece of solid metal into some intricate design? And how can I transfer that skill into a different project and use it in this way?”
[258-263] So, I feel like that only increased my desire and I still wanted to be an engineer. The schooling, obviously as we go on, gets harder and becomes more of a workload. But, I still have that curiosity. We’re doing less hands on now than we are doing theoretical work, and I think the hands on is what keeps me interested. But the theoretical work does satisfy me to an extent because it’s still the satisfaction of solving problems or figuring out equations and finding the right numbers.