Spring Break in San Diego

Abby Frankart, Senior, Mechanical Engineering

Athens, OH 28 March 2012 – This spring break I had the opportunity to travel with several of my fellow Robe Leadership scholars to Sunny San Diego! We spent two intense days speaking with CEOs of several startup companies, touring their facilities, and learning about leadership “in the trenches.” It was a lot of a fun and a really great learning experience.

The most memorable part of the trip however, was visiting the engineer’s playground: the USS Midway. It is a retired aircraft carrier turned museum anchored on the San Diego bay. The carrier was decommissioned in 1992, and is now staffed with volunteers who toured on the Midway.
It was a really great piece of history, but on top of that there are lots of things for an engineer to play with. It was a self-guided tour, and we took full advantage of pressing every button, turning every valve, and flipping every switch within arm’s length. On the flight deck, there were planes and helicopters everywhere. You could climb in the pilot’s seat in many of the aircraft. (I may or may not have cut a line of anxious 8-year-olds on a field trip to get in the pilot’s seat.) The USS Midway is a must see for anyone in the San Diego area.

Spring Break in Chicago

Evan Teske, Senior, Industrial and Systems Engineering

Athens, OH 27 March 2012 – Spring break this year started with St. Patty’s Day weekend, and for anyone that has seen The Fugitive, you may have noted that Chicago is a popular place to celebrate. This is mostly because of the parade, and also every year the city dyes the river green, which is a pretty cool tradition. So for this year’s holiday I road tripped up to the Windy City with a few friends from high school and stayed with my former Bromley roommate in Humboldt Park. Some connections we had with DePaul graduates made the weekend a success, and the combination of their experience and time spent in town gave us plenty of good things to do and see.

Since I was on break, I opted to stay a few extra nights in the city and take the Amtrak back on that Wednesday. This allowed time to do some site seeing that would have been difficult with more people, especially using all public transportation. My friend whom I was staying with did not have to work, so I had a travel buddy that understood the bus and train (CTA) systems. Some cool sites I had not been to before were Millennium Park, The Cultural Center (formerly the main library), China Town, The Chicago Board of Trades, and to the top of the Willis Tower (see the picture below).

I really enjoyed the trip also because I will be living and working in Chicago once I graduate, and being able to see the city from an insider’s perspective like my friend’s made me pretty excited about relocating. Chicago has a lot to offer and seems like a great place to start out my career.

Last Quarter

Grace Sallar, Senior, Civil Engineering

Athens, OH 25 March 2012 – I am incredibly excited about this quarter because it is going to be my last one as an undergraduate student! I have a pretty laid back schedule. Three required classes and tennis! I am taking Pre-stressed concrete, a senior design class, and a Hinduism. I’ve always wanted to know about different religions and the Hinduism class is going to be a great opportunity for me to do that.

For my senior design class, there are two options: working on a bridge or a building. I have decided to go with the bridge design option since I will most likely get into that when I graduate and get into the work force. The senior design class is something I have been waiting for since sophomore year, and even though it’s going to be very stressful and full of work, it marks the end of my undergraduate journey, and that’s more than enough for me.

The Truth About Professors

Jessica Borer,
Senior, Electrical Engineering

Athens, OH 15 March 2012 – Every time a student fills out a course evaluation for an engineering professor, they have the chance of nominating them for the award of Outstanding Professor. The Engineering Ambassadors get the privilege of interviewing the nominees from each program. Not only did this give me a chance to meet professors from other majors but I learned quite a bit about the different roles a professor has. Obviously professors have to make lesson plans and grade our homework and exams but they also need to do research in their specializations. Many of them are also involved with numerous other activities: they have administrative roles within the college, are advisors for university groups, and on top of all this they all have a group of students that they are advisors to personally. They’re just as busy as we are.

One of the questions in the interview process was how they balance all their different roles. The amazing thing about Ohio University is that every single professor we asked said that teaching is their number one priority and all their other responsibilities come after that. This is apparent in almost every class I’ve taken here. Every professor tries to make sure that every student knows they are more than welcome to come to their office any time and ask questions they have about the class or anything else they may be wondering about. OU Professors try their hardest to make sure the students get everything they need to succeed not only in their class but in college. They are a big part of what makes Ohio University so great for undergraduate students.

ETM Senior Design Production Run

Eric Biggins, Senior, Engineering Technology and Management

Athens, OH 5 March 2012 – For the past two quarters, I have been taking my senior capstone class. In the Engineering Technology and Management program, our Professor splits our class up into four groups where each group has to design a product from the ground up to be manufactured in a production run at the end of the quarter.

My group was the first one to go in the class in which we built 26 small cabinets in 6 hours. It may not seem like much at first, but we put in an awful lot of work into our project. We started off by designing the product and making 3-D drawings of it in SolidEdge. Next, we had to build a prototype and all of the tooling that we were going to use in our production run in order to make the multiple batches of the same parts within specification. Along with all of the tooling and drawings we had to make, we also had to make a bill of materials, product structure, cost sheets, flow charts for the movement of parts throughout the lab and much more.

The whole scope of the project is to understand how a real manufacturing facility operates with all of the inputs of a process to come out with a finished product. The ETM senior capstone is a lot of fun, and it gives us seniors the chance to put everything we have learned together in one final project.