Technical and Professional Skills

I first heard about Sweet Briar College at one of my softball tournaments during the summer. Softball is a large part of my life, so naturally when Sweet Briar's softball coach contacted me and told me that they were starting a new varsity softball program, I was immediately interested. I am a freshman this year, and am enjoying my new atmosphere. Coming into Sweet Briar I already had some background of several technical and professional skills:

Technical:

- iMac laptops from my high school.

- Dell laptops from my personal computer at home.

- Microsoft Excel - my mom is an accountant and she taught me how to use Microsoft Excel to create spreadsheets for school work.

- Power Point presentation software from my high school presentation assignments.

Professional:

- Presentation Skills

- Public Speaking Skills (I was a class officer one year, and had to make speeches.)

- Communication Skills

- Athletic Training room hours (Assistant)

Previous Education:

- Mills E. Godwin High School (Graduated in the class of 2004)

Communication and Teamwork Skills

The first semester of my freshman year, I took an engineering course which was titled Engr. 101: Intro to Engineering Design; Designing Her World. The main purpose of this class was to introduce students to the design process. To encourage the design process the course instructor, Professor Kurt Schulz assigned two main projects: The Cardboard Boat Project and The Parabolic Beanie Baby Design Mechanism (PBBLM) Project. Throughout both projects I not only learned the design process, but I learned many valuable teamwork skills such as learning to trust my team, making clear goals for team meetings, how to communicate effectively, and most of all, positive social skills. Below are pictures taken during the racing of our team's cardboard boat:

The picture to the left is Mary, Julie, and I putting our boat into the water at the lake by the boat house on Sweet Briar's campus. Part of the requirements for this project was that each boat must support two people who are in the boat within ten seconds of the start of the race. Through the design process we focused mainly on creating a stable design so that we did not sink easily. Even though stabilizing our boat is what we focused on, we still had difficulty getting into the boat without tipping it over and sinking immediately. Our group also did not practice getting inside the boat, so from the beginning our team was behind in the race.

The picture to the right was taken during the actual race. We needed to navigate our cardboard boat through a 50 yard figure - 8 course. Jessie is in the front of the boat with me in the back. Before the race, we had made paddles to help us move faster through the water. After using them to paddle for a few minutes, we realizes that they did not work. We threw them out in the water and continued paddling with our hands, but without anything to help with paddling except our hands, we slipped further behind in the race. Not only did our group have difficulty paddling with our hands, we had not discussed how to actually navigate the boat. Neither Julia nor I knew which side of the boat to paddle on in order to make the boat turn right or left. This put us EVEN FURTHER behind in the race.

This picture is our boat after the cardboard boat race and after the endurance test. The endurance test was a test that showed how long our boat could stay afloat with added weights after the competition. Each team member got out of the boat, and placed the added weights in as they desired and placed a life jacket on the top. As soon as the life jack touched the water for five seconds, the boat was official sunk. Our team, The Ess Bee Sea Nauti Gal, came is last in the race and in the endurance test. Our team was disappointed in the boat's performance in the race, but it did stay afloat for the whole race and for 37 minutes during the endurance test.

The second main project of the semester was to design and construct a Parabolic Beanie Baby Launch Mechanism (PBBLM). This project was little more relaxed and fun than the first one. Professor Schulz created a fictitious setting ("unnavigable, piranha - infested, crocodile, ridden rivers, and over mountainous jungles full of pythons, tarantulas, scorpions, etc.") in which each team needed to launch a beanie baby safely across. To the right is a picture of the layout inside the Sweet Briar gymnasium. Each team had to make it over the "mountainous terrain" at least 5 of the nine launches. The mountainous terrain was a 6 foot dry erase board. Each team started from a launch pad that was 6 feet away from the dry erase board.

During the competition, Professor Schulz would announce coordinates for each team to hit during their launch. The winner of this competition was decided by a Figure of Merit (FOM). The FOM was decided by targets hit, and weight and shipping volume of the PBBLM. Our team, Team Bombshell, constructed a design with launching arm that broke twice resulting a a couple of long nights where we had to re - design and re - construct our model. Our final design weighed 9 lbs., a large shipping volume, and hit two targets in the first round. Our FOM was 30934, and our team came in 3rd place. The picture to the right is Jessie and I before the competition assembling our catapult.

There were many other small projects that our class worked on in teams during lab time, such as the reverse engineering lab. During this lab, each team picked out an appliance (for example our group picked a hair dryer) and took the appliance apart and plugged it in to see how it works from the inside. These projects helped me learn many of the important engineering design aspects as well as many engineering design fields that I did not know existed. During this course, I also learned how to write a memo, write formal reports, and learned many of the engineering ethics.

Professional and Personal Growth

The projects in this course helped me to learn skills that would help in classes other than engineering. The excel program taught will help me in future math classes. The Microsoft word lesson on creating a table of contents, using headers and footers, etc. will help me on research papers in future English, literature, and history courses that I need to take. This class has helped me to develop necessary teamwork skills for my athletic training career. This course definitely exceeded the expectations I had at the beginning of the semester. I have learned more technical, professional, and communication skills in this one class than all of my other classes combined. Even though I have learned a lot this semester, I still have some weaknesses. I need to improve my skills for writing the abstract and conclusion sections of the formal report. I also need to learn to be more open - minded to other group member ideas. The last thing I hope to improve on is knowing that just because my group's design did not come in first does not mean that it is a bad design or that I did not learn something from the project.

Sweet Briar College

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