Engineering Your Community: Learning to Engineer Better
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>>read “Honors Experience Reflection”
When registering for classes in the spring, I was looking for an honors seminar to take in the fall that interested me. As I looked through them, the “Engineering Your Community” (“EYC”) seminar jumped out at me. I had just completed one year of engineering curriculum and decided it was about time that I start making a difference in people’s lives with what I had been learning. Little did I know at the time, but this was a pretty big understatement about what I would be doing over the fall semester of 2014 with my group in “EYC”.
It turned out that the basis of this class would be working heavily with Beechwood Nursing Home to design devices that would positively impact the lives of their residents. The residents of Beechwood Home suffer from a wide variety of physical ailments, like Parkinson’s and Multiple Sclerosis, so they were in need of many different devices that ultimately could improve the independence of the residents and/or their quality of life by even just a little bit.
Looking back, I picked quite the brave project. I wasn’t quite sure what we were embarking on when I said I wanted to work with the “room control” team, but ultimately we decided to work towards a help button that the residents could activate by simply looking at it with their eyes. I know what you’re thinking: that’s super crazy. I still kind of think we were crazy, but the technology completely exists and would, in this case, be incredibly helpful to those residents who no longer have the strength to push a button or use their vocal chords to make an audible call for help.
Throughout the course of the semester, we ran into one problem after another. It was a really hard lesson to learn that when you were ready to make all of these plans, sometimes you have to wait weeks on end for a part to come in that is 100% necessary to being work. You can probably imagine my expectations as a young engineer: I’m going to make a difference, pop out a device, get a patent, sell it for millions, retire. You know, the whole nine yards. Clearly that didn’t happen. Although we really didn’t get a finished project, or honestly even a functional code to run the computer behind the device, I learned such an important lesson that every early engineering student should learn: that things NEVER go perfectly according to plan.
I learned really quickly that designing a device, programming that device, and then de-bugging that device is a process that doesn’t happen too rapidly. It’s one of the hardest things to experience when you’re incredibly excited about a topic/project and there are so many things to overcome in order to get it going. Eventually, my partners and I got a sketch of the device made, the primary pieces of hardware connected and communicating, and a general understanding of a very new programming finished, but definitely not as much as we had hoped to accomplish. Speaking of my partners, I learned a really great lesson from them too. There were three of us: one biomedical engineering sophomore, a mechanical engineering freshman, and a biology/pre-med senior. Definitely not the “Justice League” or “Incredibles” when it comes to computer device design. What I did learn, though, from working with Ethan and Evan is that interdisciplinary work is seriously important and a really valuable skill to have.
Although we didn’t finish our project, I can honestly say my engineering curriculum was enhanced by Ethan’s skill in computer programming that he brought and Evan’s sense of professionalism and organization. Going into it, I would say that my three semesters’ worth of programming education was most helpful and the new type of programming that I learned from Ethan will be the most valuable information I got out of this. Although, I can say that moving forward now, I will have more realistic expectations from every team/project I work on and can apply the engineering skills and social skills that I learned from this semester into every project I work on from here on out. This experience was so incredibly meaningful particularly because as a pre-med student, it was really important and influential for me to see the different kinds of ailments people are living with every day and how we, as a generation coming to the professional fields, can help them in the best way we know how.
>>End
Artifact:
>>read “Honors Experience Reflection”
When registering for classes in the spring, I was looking for an honors seminar to take in the fall that interested me. As I looked through them, the “Engineering Your Community” (“EYC”) seminar jumped out at me. I had just completed one year of engineering curriculum and decided it was about time that I start making a difference in people’s lives with what I had been learning. Little did I know at the time, but this was a pretty big understatement about what I would be doing over the fall semester of 2014 with my group in “EYC”.
It turned out that the basis of this class would be working heavily with Beechwood Nursing Home to design devices that would positively impact the lives of their residents. The residents of Beechwood Home suffer from a wide variety of physical ailments, like Parkinson’s and Multiple Sclerosis, so they were in need of many different devices that ultimately could improve the independence of the residents and/or their quality of life by even just a little bit.
Looking back, I picked quite the brave project. I wasn’t quite sure what we were embarking on when I said I wanted to work with the “room control” team, but ultimately we decided to work towards a help button that the residents could activate by simply looking at it with their eyes. I know what you’re thinking: that’s super crazy. I still kind of think we were crazy, but the technology completely exists and would, in this case, be incredibly helpful to those residents who no longer have the strength to push a button or use their vocal chords to make an audible call for help.
Throughout the course of the semester, we ran into one problem after another. It was a really hard lesson to learn that when you were ready to make all of these plans, sometimes you have to wait weeks on end for a part to come in that is 100% necessary to being work. You can probably imagine my expectations as a young engineer: I’m going to make a difference, pop out a device, get a patent, sell it for millions, retire. You know, the whole nine yards. Clearly that didn’t happen. Although we really didn’t get a finished project, or honestly even a functional code to run the computer behind the device, I learned such an important lesson that every early engineering student should learn: that things NEVER go perfectly according to plan.
I learned really quickly that designing a device, programming that device, and then de-bugging that device is a process that doesn’t happen too rapidly. It’s one of the hardest things to experience when you’re incredibly excited about a topic/project and there are so many things to overcome in order to get it going. Eventually, my partners and I got a sketch of the device made, the primary pieces of hardware connected and communicating, and a general understanding of a very new programming finished, but definitely not as much as we had hoped to accomplish. Speaking of my partners, I learned a really great lesson from them too. There were three of us: one biomedical engineering sophomore, a mechanical engineering freshman, and a biology/pre-med senior. Definitely not the “Justice League” or “Incredibles” when it comes to computer device design. What I did learn, though, from working with Ethan and Evan is that interdisciplinary work is seriously important and a really valuable skill to have.
Although we didn’t finish our project, I can honestly say my engineering curriculum was enhanced by Ethan’s skill in computer programming that he brought and Evan’s sense of professionalism and organization. Going into it, I would say that my three semesters’ worth of programming education was most helpful and the new type of programming that I learned from Ethan will be the most valuable information I got out of this. Although, I can say that moving forward now, I will have more realistic expectations from every team/project I work on and can apply the engineering skills and social skills that I learned from this semester into every project I work on from here on out. This experience was so incredibly meaningful particularly because as a pre-med student, it was really important and influential for me to see the different kinds of ailments people are living with every day and how we, as a generation coming to the professional fields, can help them in the best way we know how.
>>End
Artifact:
final_help_button_presentation.ppt | |
File Size: | 913 kb |
File Type: | ppt |