Thinking about a New Blog

Thinking about a New Blog

I can see that ED1 (Engineering Design I) is going to be an experience worth blogging about by itself. In the next couple of sememsters my group and I are going to
a) Come up with a project
b) Design it and write the specs
c) Build it
d) Make it actually work

Since many of my friends have been through this class before I already know that the biggest challenge is step d. This is why I think this will something interesting to write about.

This class is so important to the Department that they actually have 3 proffesors and a Full-Time TA assigned to this class. The classroom was filled with, If I remember correctly: 12 Mechanical, 14 Computer and 14 Electrical Engineers, oddly enough there are no Civil, and no Ocean Engineers in it, what's up with that?

I did a poor job of selling myself, we had to introduce ourselves to the class, I was one of the first ones to go, and I did not want to come across as an pompous arrogant jerk, something like "I work for Eye Bee Em, therefore I are smarter than thou" So I said something like, Hi, My name is Jose, I have experience in Hardware Design..

Meanwhile the rest of my classmates kept on getting better and better at presenting their skills, picking up on what the person before them did wrong, by the time we got to the last row, we were getting pretty interesting introductions, "Hi my name is John, I am a computer Engineer and I hate computers...." was a good one. The purpose of this was to get to know each other so we can pick our team members. This is a crucial step, since the success of the project depends on having a good Team. I don't know if I want to work with friends since that does not necessarily mean we will get work done. I'd rather get with the super smart group that's building a lunar-rover-cell-phone-email-gps-photocopy robot made out of a cerial box and a casio watch. That's the group I am looking for so all I have to do is write a Assembler program for it and let them do the Engineering. Well, maybe not. I do want to get something out of this.

I am not going to lie, I actually look forward to this project thing. I don't know who my Team mates are going to be, or what exactly we are going to make, but it already sounds like a lot of fun.



J.V.