Skill development, in-depth knowledge, and leadership were the primary goals of my second year at Ohio State. The first semester of the year comprised of two major new experiences, starting the position as a Teaching Assistant (TA) within the Engineering Education Department (EED) and beginning my path to completing a mathematics minor. The TA role has allowed me to obtain a deeper understanding within MATLAB and SOLIDWORKS, which are primary programs within the mechanical engineering profession. The mathematics minor has a specialization within project-based courses, which provides me insight into applications that are used within the product development field, more specifically differential equations. The second semester of the year included the first courses while being enrolled as a mechanical engineer, no longer a pre-major. With the enrolment came challenges and competition, the first courses in the major are what later courses are built on and mechanical engineering being one of the more competitive majors of engineering to get into mean each one of your classmates are extremely intelligent, adding to the course difficulty. I also took part in my first primarily design-based courses, where I used machinery to fabricate an air motor and coded with an Arduino a PPE Station. These directly lead into the product development and design engineering internship that I am taking part in this summer. At Solutions in Polycarbonate, I will be designing drawings, fabrications components, and completing calculations with a professional engineer.

Challenges and obstacles encompassed my first year at Ohio State.

The goal of college is to challenge yourself and unleash your true potential, which is why I made my first semester as difficult as possible within reason. I had the opportunity to partake in multivariable calculus, honors fundamentals of engineering, and its physics equivalent. These courses allowed me to develop a skill set that otherwise was not available through the less rigorous track. I developed knowledge within MATLAB, C/C++, an in-depth look at mechanical anomalies, and diverse mathematical applications. Each skill provided me a diverse and intuitive way of thinking within my mechanical engineering coursework, which differed from my classmates. However, the courses did ground me and showed me that with new each skill developed, difficulties will arise.

My second semester involved obstacles both within the classroom and in the outside world. Continuing with the challenging mentality, I again pursued the rigorous path within my coursework, which involved a robotic construction course. Within this course, a team mentality was developed, and it involved other sectors of the engineering design field, budget, planning, and execution. This course allowed me to partake in practices I was to continue as my career, design engineering, where criteria were given and designs had to be developed to execute the criteria within a minimalistic lens. Testing had to take place and then was halted by a worldwide pandemic. Though the mentality that was developed pushed our team to continue to execute the task and further develop the skills at hand.