This subsection of my portfolio is dedicated to tracking my competencies in the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB) Graduate Attributes for the Design for the Environment course, MIE315.
I define the impact of engineering on society and the environment as the priority of all design work which should have the goal of improving the user’s lives while minimizing environmental destruction. It unavoidable that mistakes will happen but it is the duty of the engineer to sign off on a project if they believe it has been completed to the best of their abilities, as symbolized by the Iron Ring. If the impact of engineering were a bridge; communication, teamwork, and professionalism would be the supports it sits on. I see these traits as the basis of all project work as they provide a group of people with the abilities to cooperate with each other to complete a common goal. By prioritizing the communication within a team, more ideas can be explored while the number of mistakes are reduced.
As the semester has almost come to an end, my next big task is the help the University of Toronto Robotics Association (UTRA) 3D Printing Team transition into Fabrication Team. Communication, teamwork, and professionalism will be main areas I will be focusing on. Since Fabrication is a support team, our main task will be to help UTRA’s design teams determine how to manufacture their parts while ensuring they have the required training. As the equipment we have is limited, open communication between the teams will be a priority for properly spacing the machine usage. This year, SUMO (an entry-level team that helps students build their own autonomous robots) offered 3D printing as an option for creating their robots’ chassis, resulting in around 15 chassis printed. It was lucky that there were no other design teams that needed to print parts during this time, as SUMO was running the printers constantly, but this is definitely an area that needs to be improved on. The future goal for Fabrication is to be able to coordinate the other design teams well enough to support each other; an example of this would be one team starting a 3D print while another team comes to supervise it until completion. The final challenge of Fabrication will be training as it must be ensured that members will not hurt themselves on the equipment. This will likely lead to strict regulations about what equipments members are allowed to use without supervision, but hopefully as next school year continues, we will have enough trained members to supervise untrained ones.
A more long term application of these areas are capstone and post-graduation job hunting. Since capstone is going to be a full year project, coordinating the work with my teammates will be vital to ensure everything gets done in timely fashion. After school, I would like to work towards a Professional Engineer (P. Eng) license. Engineering impact is definitely something I will continue to consider in future projects as I hope to have a job that allows me to design parts.