Senior Design Portfolio

One of our graduation requirements is to make a design portfolio of all the design work that we've done over the past four years. In putting that together I really got to see the progress of my engineering and design skills mature over the years. I really don't have anything from freshman year but we did a bunch of design projects in sophomore year. And looking back at them, I am surprised at the quality of them. Obviously, at the time, I did the best I could on each of the projects but they were just not well designed or thought through.

At the end of junior year at Cambridge, we elected to take two project classes that allowed us to use the skills that we learned over the year. One of my projects was the design of a quay wall. That was a really amazing design project. In the end, we weren't able to produce a very professional report but we did an incredible amount of analysis. We did a lot of calculations to come up with our recommendations. The really cool thing was that we were applying knowledge that we had learned over the past year to make those calculations. And when I started my internship last summer, I felt that that project was a really good learning experience as well.

And now during senior year, we're doing a bunch of projects for our senior design class. But I think the projects I did for D-Lab last semester will also be a big part of my portfolio. The rammed earth project was a research and design project that I really enjoyed and learned a lot from. I think that had I known what a thesis was, I might have opted to make it into a thesis. I always thought that a thesis was something that involved research on some mysterious thing. But I think the rammed earth project, or parts of it, could easily become a thesis and I would be able to have an undergraduate thesis. After speaking to a professor today over dinner, I realized that the department really didn't do much in terms of helping us with career choices and advising. I think having an undergraduate thesis would definitely help with graduate school choices later on. Anyway, this should probably be in a separate post of its own.

The point of this post is that I'm really glad to see that I've really have learned a lot about engineering design over these past few years. It's just really amazing to see my design skills mature over the years and from project to project.