To M.E. or not to M.E. for me...

[archiver]

Posted by Fran .

Other on team #166, Team Merrimack, from Merrimack High School and Texas Instruments/R.S. Machines.

Posted on 10/22/2000 4:08 AM MST


In Reply to: To M.E. or not to M.E. for me... posted by Ken on 10/21/2000 1:23 AM MST:



Even though I am not an engineer, it seems you are looking well ahead as in life after college. Ask yourself how will you know what is different and another path, if you do not know what has already been developed?College would be the place to learn this and prepare yourself to develop your unique things whether on your own or after hours of a job. After all if there were courses in it then it would already have been done. I suspect you just need to get your degree and go workfor FIRST or DEKA since they are always on a different beat.........isn't that the goal of all FIRSTers?

Fran
Team 166



: The following is a long essay about my thoughts of what I want to do, and a question of what I should do. I doubt any reader will have enough patience to finish this, but I can no longer hold my thought to myself. I will be grateful to any time people spend reading this, or maybe even a tiny respond. But I AM hoping to get some advice from people...

: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- As I said before, I am a mechanical engineering major student. I picked this major because I am amazed about how simple “little things” work just the way you want it to when you use it right (during the robotics competition of course). Little things like: nuts & bolts and wrenches, screws & screw drivers, washers and bearings, gears, pulleys, wheels, sprockets & chains, hammers, pliers... And they work just because of simple physics. To me, they represent consistency, ingenuity, reliability, and efficiency.

: After those “little things” came our 70 years old machines: Band saw, lathe, vertical mill, sander, and grinder. They gave me the precision I never had when come to “making” parts, compare to the days when I only have papers, scissors and Elmer’s glue. In addition, after learning how to use AutoCAD, I learned to express ideas with precise measurements through drawings. Heck, those drawings look a lot straighter and rounder than my old crayon drawings of the sun.
: Finally, when you put those things together, you can make complicated machines such as the robots in this competition. And when you go even deeper, you can create more sophisticated machines like automobiles, surgical robotic-arm, aircrafts... etc. So I love how all these are created because of the simple physics and the “little things”. YEAH!!!

: So now I am well on my way in Mechanical engineering, and, as many people told me, I will be facing a lot of choices, some of the major ones like Thermo-fluid sciences, Statics / Structure, Dynamics, Dynamic systems / vibration, Controls... etc. As I look closer and closer, most of these topics are well developed, and there are lots of companies out there being the expert of them. There are lots of places out there waiting for the next generation of young women/men to continue the practices and expand the field. But I am not sure that’s what I really want.
: Now don’t get me wrong. Those places have a lot of opportunity for further development and growth, and they are exciting and challenging to work in. But I don’t really want to follow someone else’s footstep. I believe in freethinking without many constraints, just like how we design the robot for this competition with only weight, size, parts, and material limit. No one to tell us our robot has to do this or has to act that way... But if I work in the field of, for example, automobile, then I will be limited by the market, conventional automobile design, as well as the narrow-minded image people have on automobiles. Or say I went into a computer related major, then the most I can do are still making computer better or faster, just because the people before foresee an object call “computer” and decided how it will act as a calculation tool or what kind of growth it will have to make life better for people.
:
: These might not be entirely true, but I am only trying to show my point. What I really want is the challenge of exploring the unknown, attacking a brand-new problem with different ways of innovative thinking, and come up with revolutionary design that will change the way of thinking forever. This may sounds a little bit ambitious, but having a design named after you, or maybe starting a new kind of engineering for students to study in sound really nice. I probably cannot succeed in doing any of this because I am not good enough, but it’s still a nice dream to have. Maybe if I have the guts to add an additional step into this “new path”, then maybe someone else will think “Wow! What a great idea”, and take an additional step into his/her own “new path”.

: So here I am, in the University of California- Berkeley, being a first year student in one of the best school for Mechanical Engineering, having a constant struggle in my mind about my future career. On one hand, I love the conventional way of thinking in Mechanical Engineering (how people think of and invent gears, nuts & bolts, chains, wheels... etc.) and hope to make more out of it; on the other hand, I would like to explore the unknown, have my own kind of new thinking and development, create new ideas and principles, and face new challenges everyday.

: If I am to choose the second choice, should I drop out of ME? Or will ME’s range be wide enough for me to do it?

: One more question: Am I the only one out there with these crazy thoughts? Maybe I watch too much Star Trek: The Next Generation...
: “Space, the final frontier. These are the..... ......To explore strange, new world, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”