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amanda quotes

Amanda’s Quotes #3

[167-172] Yeah, one class that all engineers is [Intro engineering course], that we’re having a few projects throughout the semester, one was you were supposed to design an airplane or you were supposed to do the calculations, you were not really suppose to design it, like how much air and drag it had, and it would give you some practice, like it would need to be able to fly from here to Europe and then you need to do some assumptions and calculations, so that was more like a math project.

[172-177] And we had a second project, you were supposed to do a ball launcher for a dog which the dog can use without the owner being home. That was a lot of math calculations, maybe like what angle you wanted the ball to be thrown in and stuff, but that one we were actually supposed to build. We didn’t design it on the computer because we hadn’t learned how to do that so we just had to sketch on the paper and a few classes you can be in workshop and working on it.

[185-194] I’m just the kind of person that wants stuff to be done as quick as possible and not to do it the night before, so I think I usually take the role where I’m like trying to make a group of the students pass the ball and like making sure we get started. But then, I think we stayed equal amongst all of us. Some people come with some ideas what kind of ball launch we could do and all of us came up with like two different ideas that was like what we decided to do, and then one day we met up and just discussed which one we liked the most. There was a combination of two of them and then we started to build and there was one guy in our group that had been a worker once, so he kinda knew the most and he kinda told us what to do and how to build it.

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amanda quotes

Amanda’s Quotes #7

[74-79] In this [materials] class, we have a project where we are going to analyze failures. We were told to pick an object, determine why the object broke, and what can we do about it. So, my group decided to analyze a cleat, like a soccer shoe, so it cracked on the bottom, so right now we’re working on why it happened, why there’s so much stress there, and what can we do to reduce the stress concentration at that specific spot.
[81-86; 88-92; 95-102] We’re building a CAD model of it to determine the material. First, we contacted the company, but they didn’t want to tell us so then, we need to figure it out for ourselves. By burning the materials, it can say like oh it did not get a lot of smoke from it, those kinds of properties. So, then we can determine what kind of plastic it was.

In addition to the CAD model, we have come up with a description that informs the user how many steps you have to take during a practice and how much you can use the cleat. Also, we determined the material. So, basically where we’re left to do is to come up with a solution for the problem, what can we do for the cleat to not break. Working with my teammates has been good. We have been working a lot independently. So, we started off by deciding from the beginning what everyone was responsible for, and then we made the time plan, so for this day this person is going to finish this task. So then, everyone got a couple tasks, and you had days when it’s supposed to be due. So far, everyone has done what they’re supposed to do. It’s the one person doing a lot more than everyone else. I think he’s really interested in this class, and a really good student, so he’s taking more even though we know he’s not supposed to do it.

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amanda quotes

Amanda’s Quotes #13

[192-197] Another course called Preliminary Design involves a yearlong project. I am working in a group of three, and we are designing an ankle brace that is supposed to prevent ankle sprains in soccer. In the beginning of the semester, we had lectures, which covered how you should think when you are picking out material, or how you should think when have different concepts, and the concept selection. But now later on in the semester, all those class times have just been time for us to be able to work on a project.

[200-207] I’m working in very good group. Everyone is doing what they’re supposed to do. And our goal is to have a prototype by the end of the semester, and we are using a flexible plastic called CPAs. That is supposed to allow natural range of motion and also provide forces at a higher velocity. We are 3-D printing the brace to be able to do thin, because current braces on the market are very bulky. And we have now downloaded prototype, and obviously it’s going to have to be redone because it was used the outer shell of it. So, there’s no support yet or anything.

[210-212] So when we’re getting our prototype by the end of this semester, we go ahead and do testing on it next semester. Probably redesign it to make it better than the current one on the market.

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josh quotes

Josh’s Quotes #3

[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.

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josh quotes

Josh’s Quotes #7

(176-177; 179-183) So the [mechatronics] practicum, he—well, so we are usually working in groups of two in class when we do labs, when we do projects, anything like that. When you come in he gives you, basically a lab sheet like you would with any other thing, except you’re expected to do it on your own. So we basically start with a hundred, and then every time you have to ask for help or you get something wrong, he deducts points. And you’re based on your ability to build and test a circuit without the assistance of the professor.

(145; 201-203) . . . right now we’re also working on a design project. I only have one team member. I know my team member from last semester. And this semester we have a lot of classes together, so we’ve gotten to know each other a lot better, so we work together well. But it’s very low stress environment. We’re both very open to the other’s ideas, and if we don’t understand, we’re honest about it.

(434-436; 438; 446-450; 439) I don’t interact with all of my peers, but the peers that I do interact are pretty much the same ones that I see day to day and that I interact day to day and it’s a very helpful environment. And I mean not everyone likes everyone. I’m not saying this is the case, but I might be a quiet introverted person and someone might be loud and extroverted, and I don’t want to be around them. Or they might be rude and obnoxious and I don’t want to be around it or vice versa. Someone may consider me rude and obnoxious. Or when I answer the questions in class, people might consider me a teacher’s pet, but we can put aside our differences to help each other.

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joy quotes

Joy’s Quotes #29

[356-381] I’m also working on my junior project. In this class, there’s four sub teams now. There’s the printheads, so they’re in charge of mixing sulfur and sand into a 3D printable material, so highly chemistry related. I am not on that team. And then the fine positioning system, which is in charge of what you would think of when you see a 3D printer, it’s the three axes that move the printhead. And then another team is in charge of the course positioning system. We don’t know if it will be four wheels, but four wheeled structure that the printhead will then be on. The printhead can travel across the bar at the top, and basically, it just drives. And then another team is in charge of the GPS locationing system, because we need to know where we are within the world plane.

So I’m on the spine positioning system, so I’m in charge of the three axes that this printhead is going to move in. And on my sub team, my specific role is the structural integrity. I’m in charge of belts, screws in the actual structure. thankfully for me, that makes it really easy to move online, because I can use SOLIDWORKS or Autodesk Inventor to model this. And they have built in stress and thermal testing and all of that stuff, so that’s really good. I’m not sure the other people are going to test their stuff. We’re still working on a way to integrate all of it, because there’s something called LTspice, which can model circuits. So, the electrical engineer on our sub team, he can model the circuits, but I’m not sure how we’re going to model communication between sub teams. So, fine positioning system communicating the pretense location with the course positioning system within the planet’s surface. So, that’s something we’re going to figure out when we get there.

[411-417] Overall, junior project is going well. We have Zoom meetings in place of our lecture meetings, which usually lasts 15 minutes. I meet with my sub team in a Zoom meeting on Wednesdays. And I meet with the full class and all the professors on Mondays to get a plan for that week and for all of the professors to be aware of what’s going on. And then throughout the week. It’s only week two but so far each person has been working on their own and then we’re communicating with the group meet or Zoom, if we have problems within our sub team and we need to communicate that.

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lauren quotes

Lauren’s Quotes #1

[137-142; 152-157] My first semester, I didn’t have many engineering classes. It was mostly like math and general education courses, but I did have to take a class called ‘Engineering 101’ and they taught us free-body diagrams and force equals mass times acceleration. It was more physics than engineering, but we had recitation classes every week where we would apply the physics to real-world stuff, at least try to. Sometimes the projects were a little sad. When we were learning about momentum, we would stack two golf balls on top of each other and drop them on the ground. At the end of the first semester, we had a project where we designed a puck launcher where we had to launch the puck across the table. You scored points based on where the puck landed on the table.

[143-149; 158-161; 165-170; 172-173] During the second semester, I took ‘Engineering 102’ where we did more stuff with circuits and harmonic motions. We were given a problem and we had to design a solution to that problem. For that one, my group got the assignment of a STEM toy. Make it so that kids enjoy learning STEM. My group made a basketball launcher game, like a tabletop basketball. You had to figure out what angle you’re throwing the ball at and what force. We chose to design a basketball launcher since it seemed to be the easiest thing that we could come up with based on the time we could all work on the project together. There were four of us to the group, but we didn’t really know each other beforehand, so we weren’t good friends and they just randomly assigned us. Our schedules didn’t match up all that well, so we only had class time to work on the project. I didn’t have as much fun as my senior thesis, but we got it done and we made a marketing video for it. We presented it to the class, and we got a good grade I also had my first mechanical engineering class in the second semester. I took a statics course that focused on free body diagrams. I still talk with some of the professors when I see them in the hall. In some instances, I would ask them how they were doing. Even though the ‘Engineering 102’ class was huge, 600 people, the professors still recognized me, and it was really cool.

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lauren quotes

Lauren’s Quotes #2

[196; 200-204] I really enjoyed the projects second year of college. My programming class involved two projects. One of them was programming a Roomba to work on Mars. I trained it to walk behind me and it could play tag. My partner and I really enjoyed working on that project. The other one was working with microcontrollers, specifically Arduino. For both projects, I was partnered with someone I had never met before. We had a lot of time to work on the project and we got dinner once together because it was dinner time while we were working on the project. We clicked and we were good friends.

[227-229; 233-239] During my third semester, one of the professors reached out to me and was like, “Hey, you were a really cool student” and asked if I would want to come work in his lab. He works with magnetic nanoparticles. I am responsible for developing simulations so that we can see if we can figure out what skyrmions look like on the inside. They are like magnetic materials that are circles and they’ve got weird shape on the inside.

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lauren quotes

Lauren’s Quotes #6

[274-277; 282-290] This semester I also took a circuits class that’s required for my engineering major, and it was 100% project-based, so we would do some coding thing with what we already know and then turn in a short paper about it. Then move onto the next project. So, this semester is the first semester that they’ve structured the class as project-based. In the past, it’s been a class that’s learning how to solve circuit diagrams, which no one liked, so they’ve decided to revamp it. At the beginning of the semester, we had a couple of lectures, but for the most part, it was new projects. The first couple of projects we pulled from the instruction booklet. The booklet provides information on how you make a light blink and just really simple stuff like that. Then for a little bit, our TA was finding projects online for us to work on. Eventually, it was like, hey, look for your own projects online to work on.

[293-298; 301-311] A lot of the projects were super easy, and we finished them in less than a class period. For example, the blinking lights was pretty easy, and then as we went through the semester, the projects got harder. The last project we completed took a bunch more effort, but it was also our final project and we had to do a presentation on it. As far as the final project, we were told to pick our own project. My group and I decided to find something that’s not simple like plug in a light and turn it on with a button. Instead, we found an automatic watering device online that waters plants automatically, but the code was a bit buggy. And the class didn’t like to teach us to code with what we already know. It was more, here’s how you wire stuff, but we had a bunch of trouble with debugging the code. Debugging the code was hardest part about the project. The presentations are pretty easy, it was two to three minutes per group, because we have a bunch of groups. And you just went up there, and you’re like, hey, automatic watering system. Here’s a video of how it works.

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lauren quotes

Lauren’s Quotes #9

[522-530] My internship was also mostly scary because one, I had never been to the state before. Two, I didn’t have my car, so I walked to work and eventually got a ride from one of my coworkers. I was scared that they would look down on me, too. Sometimes, I don’t often have a country accent, but sometimes I have a Southern accent. At one point someone pointed out that I say “iron” weird. I-R-O-N. I was also sort of scared that they would see me as dumb just because sometimes I have a Southern accent because I grew up in the South. I didn’t want to look stupid is basically the whole point. But I was scared. I just didn’t want to be stupid.

[183-192] I’m not a biology person, but half of my peers studied biology or stuff like that. And half of us were assigned to physics-based projects, which is what I was on. Even with talking with the biology-ish people about their projects, we were able to help them out like, “Hey, did you think to do this?” They would put forth good input when we were talking about problems with our projects. I still talk with them even though they’re all over the US now. We’re not together, but we still talk to each other. We have a group chat. Someone the other day posted a picture and was like, “Hey, we did this.” Because they had learned about something we had done in their class.

[197-207] At the laboratory, we all did experiments with neutrons. We all had either reflectometry or SANS, which is Small Angle Neutron Scattering data. There are certain ways that you can look at the data. I was looking at data for magnetism stuff mostly. I had learned some tips or tricks with maybe the small square to get it to show the magnetism data. One of my friends would be like, “Hi, I don’t understand what this is.” And I would be like, “Hey, that looks like the [inaudible 00:16:11] from my data. Let’s click here and see what happens.” Or sometimes it was just like, “Hey, did you think to rotate the sample?” If you hadn’t rotated it and you were wondering why you couldn’t see anything, sometimes it would just be there was a commonsense thing. Just you didn’t think of that approach.

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