-Andrew Maier
My name is Andrew Maier, and I am a first year STEM EE Scholar and Chemical Engineering student at Ohio State. As a first-year engineering student, I got the chance to explore different engineering disciplines in the Fundamentals of Engineering (FE) courses at OSU (1181 and 1182 for non-honors, 1281 and 1282 for honors). These courses allow students to become experienced in the design processes, writing techniques, and ethics skills that form the foundation for future work in engineering. A large portion of each class is spent in lab; the first semester labs concern topics that cover different disciplines of engineering, while the second semester lab is a semester long design project (either the Advanced Energy Vehicle in 1182, or the FEH Robot project in 1282).
The labs that I did in 1181 concerned different disciplines of engineering. These ranged from setting up a speed trap to analyze the speed vehicles travel over a bridge (civil engineering), to constructing a spring using heat-treated fishing line that could support up to a kilogram (chemical and material sciences and engineering). The final lab in 1181 was a month-long project called the Software Development Project, or SDP. SDP concentrated on computer science and engineering, and it also tested groups on communication presentation, and writing skills. My group consisted of three people, so we decided to have two people design two games, while one person wrote the reports and presentation. I decided to design an adventure game, and went out of my comfort zone to create a graphical experience for users, rather than a simple text-based game. I feel like SDP really helped to develop my programming and technical communication skills, both of which have been important for my MATLAB course and 1182.
First-year engineering at Ohio State provides a lot of opportunities for student to explore different areas of engineering, and the Fundamentals classes allow students to find what field they want to pursue their degree in. I’ve had many challenges and learning experiences while I’ve been in the FE classes, and I’ve had the opportunity to develop my technical communication skills and learn about the many opportunities that are in each field of engineering.