Are You A CAD Specialist?

[Chris is me]

I got into CAD because of my ego, I think. I wanted to be a Cool FIRST Kid who was super helpful and held the team together. Not the most altruistic motivation, but I was 18 and inspired... So CAD was a skill much of the team lacked, so I started exploring it bit by bit. Now I think I mentor much more "for the right reasons", but now I also know CAD and can design robots. So that's cool.

I don't think I'm a person who was born to do CAD, nor am I particularly "naturally" good at it like a lot of the talented students on CD seem to be. I can never work as quickly as others at it, but to some extent that's because of how methodical and careful I am when making sketches / models.

CAD is very important to me as it is the best way I can express myself as a designer and engineer. I am pretty bad at sketching ideas quickly on paper, and though I get better with graph paper and a ruler it's often hard for me to visualize things well enough to draw them right the first time. So CAD, among other things, is the best way for me to explore and explain design ideas. I think it's important to take advantage of the flexibility of CAD and specifically being able to build models around adaptable constraints. This is the key advantage over hand drafting.