Month: November 2017

G.O.A.L.S Reflection

Throughout our experience with STEM EE scholars, we follow what we call the G.O.A.L.S. This includes:

Global Awareness: Some of our activities had a focus on international ideas and cultures, including going to an on-campus diversity event

Original Inquiry: STEM EE Scholars encourages us to look into research opportunities, finding relevant research articles, and contacting professors that may provide future research opportunities.

Academic Enrichment: The STEM learning community encourages cooperation and support between members of the community. The program also encourages students to attend educational events outside the classroom and getting involved with a STEM related student organization.

Leadership Development: Learning and practicing leadership skills is an important part of the scholars program meant to enable students to achieve and succeed in leadership roles

Service Engagement: The scholars program allows students to gain experience in different scenarios with community service opportunities throughout college.

Two particular G.O.A.L.S that I believe are more applicable to me in my future educational career are Original Inquiry and Academic Enrichment.

 

I believe Original Inquiry is applicable to me due to my experience with the scholars interview project, where we looked through research articles and interviewed a professor. I learned that accessing research and professors is not difficult at all, and I’m going to seriously consider finding a research opportunity within the next four years of college. If I end up getting involved in research, this may allow me to go to a graduate school beyond my four years of college.

 

As for Academic Enrichment, I learned that there are a lot of different student organizations that I can get involved in. If I end up taking less demanding classes in the future, I will definitely try to get involved with more student organizations within the next four years, and if I find something I enjoy, I may try to further pursue that activity after I leave college.

Engineering Group

There are many academic assignments that students must endure, and there are none more fearsome, rage inducing, and soul crushing as the group project.

 

In our Fundamentals of Engineering class, everybody was assigned a group that they would work with for the rest of semester. My group consisted of Ben Niu (far left), Matthew Reichert (center left), me (center right), and Matthew Chein (far right). Our group worked on in-class lab projects, helped each other with class assignments, and worked on long-term assignments such as lab reports and a software design project we are currently working on.

The purpose of having a long-term group is to learn to work with other people as a team, and to make the team work. Since we were stuck with each other for a full semester, surviving with a dysfunctional group was not an option if any of us wanted a good grade, so communication was essential to keeping the group together and getting group assignments done on time. Unfortunately, this is not something that we learned instantly. Slow response times and last-minute crunches happened when none of us stepped up to organize our plans.

After around the tenth week of class, Ben dropped the course, leaving us as a group of three. We are currently working on a software design project, and we set our goals high, tasking ourselves with programming a euchre game using MATLAB. Time will tell if we will be able to reach our goal and complete the game on time.