Getting ready to get ready

I've been at the University of Illinois for exactly a month today. It's a good place. ; )



So what's been going on with iFoundry? A TON of ideas, and not many decisions. I'm specifically talking about Engineering in Service to Society at the moment.

The iTeams seem to be the main focus of iFoundry to me. Do we do other stuff in iFoundry? Yes. But do I see anything special about the rest of it? No, not really. From what I hear, Eng 198 is MUCH more rigorous than Eng 100. We also have to build a steam powered car as a side project. I even had to head down to the ESPL outside of class time to work on it already. But is that special? Not in my book. It's just the average class, even though it is different, if that's what iFoundry is going for. Different from Eng 100. What does that say to me? Probably that Eng 100 is too "easy" or "pointless." Why do most students have to take Eng 100 then? I'm not sure, I'm just a freshman, sheesh...

I'm happy that I went to one of the career fairs. It ended up being unproductive in terms of actually landing an internship or anything like that, but it's some useful information to have for when I actually have a chance for position like that when I'm older.

Engineering in Service to Society is an interesting situation. We must have 30 completely different ideas by now. It seems like the iFoundry higher ups are TOTALLY leaving up our "project" up to us. It seems like we can basically choose whatever we want to do, with advice from one faculty adviser and two grad students. Open ended? Yes. Overwhelming? A bit. We really are in charge of ourselves now, and we need to make sure that we pick a "project," since that's what it seems the goal will be, that we will realistically be able to accomplish. One thing that I've been wondering is what our time line is. Are we going to try to do something this semester, while we're still in Eng 198, or maybe this year? Will we still be in iFoundry these next 4 years? I'm pretty sure that we are. But what will we be doing? Will we still be in the same iTeams as seniors as we are now? Will we have to take more special classes? That would be really hard for us. Eng 198 is doable because every engineer has to take Eng 100. But even next semester there won't be any more classes that every single engineer has to take. Will there be an iFoundry specific Electrical Engineering class in the future? That's something interesting to think about. So what is my role in this iTeam? I can honestly say that as of now, I've been the most average of the team. I'm not in a single leadership postion (Goodness we must have 7 by now.. haha) but I am becoming more and more active. I hope I can help out the team. Scratch that, I know that I can. It's just been hard sometimes because people start talking and the ball gets rolling and people are coming up with EXTREMELY optimistic ideas. I mean they sound like fun, but we don't have 50 hours in a day to be able to fit everything in... My biggest thing so far at the U of I is time management. Its very important to be efficient when there is so much that you have to do in very limited time.

Okay back to studying for that Intro to Electrical and Computer Engineering 110 test tomorrow...

This iFoundry thing

Hey guys this is my first blog for Eng 198 and iFoundry! It's already been 2 weeks of school and we've got going already. In Eng 198 we have class Wednesdays and we work on our project on Mondays.

Or project is to build a steam powered car. We are in groups of 4 or 5, and I'm in the "Perpetual Motion Squad" along with project manager Derek, Matthew, and Kevin. Derek is in charge of turbine assembly and will oversee the project since he is the manager. Matthew is in charge of building the boiler and troubleshooting. Kevin is in charge of the chassis and all sheet metal cutting, while I am in charge of building the fuel tank and the wheels and ensuring the overall quality of the car. This really is a cool project, but it will take a lot of hard work to finish on time because we have a limited amount of time.

In class, we focused on how to ask the right questions. It was hilarious to me how over the past few days after that talk, I've been thinking of that whenever I think of asking a question or hear someone ask a question. There was some good stuff in the lecture to think about. The back of the napkin book is pretty good, but I have a feeling like it's going to be the same thing over and over again. We'll see. And the Entrepreneurial Engineering book is all common sense. Well to me at least...

So the last thing I have to write about is the iFoundry iTeam thing that we're in. I am in the Engineering Service to Society iTeam. It's easily the best iTeam out there ; ) We have a TON of ideas, but we'll have to focus on one or two of them. I think that it's a great idea to do something smaller this year and then take bigger steps later on. This is a four year commitment I think.. That part is a bit confusing to me.

Overall iFoundry is a HUGE time commitment for me and it's really been tough to get through all of my other classes with it, but I think I'll adapt and be fine : )
Chris