Reflecting on ME 270 - Jasmine Cuasay

As an individual group member, I think my role in the group was more of a follower than a leader especially when it came to working outside of the lab. Although I took on a more submissive role, I was able to fulfill (most) the tasks given to me at in reasonable time frame and more than average accuracy. I also communicated with my group effectively and let them know my progress as I did my work. I would assess my work in answering mini project questions as average (>70%) because at times it was difficult to find the correct information or equation to answer accurately, which led to a deduction of points. Another of my faults would be that I rarely took initiative to guide my group in which directions to take (ex. When we would meet to gather materials, assignments to questions on reports). As a whole, my efforts in my team could have been better. I felt that if I took more effort in facilitating assignments and order then we would have finished our work sooner and more accuracy.

I learned a great deal about the what, how, and why of design for manufacturing. By that I mean learning about what it takes to make a product by choosing its design based on customer requirements and material properties to how the product will be made with the different types of manufacturing.

My highlights in ME 270 were all the hands on approaches to learning the material. An example would be when we watched our mold being made with machining and tooling during lab. A challenging part of the course for me was the more analytic aspects of manufacturing, those dealing with analyzing data like when we did our design of experiments for lab and in our main project. Perhaps this was challenging because I haven’t had a lot of exposure into statistics and only had basic knowledge of using spreadsheets.

This course taught me a lot of foundations about the different types of manufacturing and the process of it. I can apply this knowledge when considering the re-designing of products into more efficient models with the steps of design for manufacturing. Also, I can identify which manufacturing methods would be more efficient based off of what I’ve learned in this class (welding vs. machining, resin transfer molding vs resin infusion, etc…).