Necessary Groundwork

As a freshman in Virginia Tech majoring general engineering, I definitely agree to Meredith’s argument on the doubtful productivity or importance of the freshman engineering mandatory class, Foundation of Engineering 1215. Although, many engineering major students are skeptical with this mandatory ineffective class, the Foundation of Engineering class sets the basic and essential knowledge and useful information for future engineering classes and careers. As an education of “foundation” of Engineering, this class focuses on mainly the infrastructures of engineering skills: analytical approach to problem, problem solving skills, ground works for programming a flowchart and algorithms using special programs like MATLAB, CMAP, and Arduino etc., and importance of group work when writing technical papers such as reports and researches, and when making fair presentations. By learning these skills, the Foundation of Engineering class prepares engineering major students for their upcoming engineering major claim and gives clue to their various fields of engineering curriculums and careers. For instance, when I first attended to the Engineering class, I was also frustrated for what we are taught in class, since what the instructor assigned for the class was simple math problem and some surveys. The only main difference to mention was that students should use the proper form or format to solve the problem. When the problem was assigned, I was bewildered and confused about the assignment, and it was not only me who was puzzled; most of the students who were in the class was murmuring and talking back about the inefficiency, disorganization, and unproductiveness of the curriculum of the class. However doing the assignment, I thought that this assignment would make me and the other engineering students to be familiar with using analytical formats when solving the problem. Not only that, when I came to the second class, I was learned how to install and use a program called MATLAB, which helped me to do numerical computations and analyses by inputting commands and conditions. Before I have come to this class, I had no skill in programming and computing problems using computer software packages. Learning how to facilitate this software, I was able to program simple mathematical equations, to calculate simple numerical problems, and to plot the graphs that correspond to the mathematical equations. Currently in this class, I am learning how to work coordinately as single group. I was grouped to one team, and we, as a team, should work on one single project that is composed of three major reports and one presentation and evaluation. At first, I was skeptical of group projects, because cooperation of all team members is hard to achieve due to contrasting opinions and different class schedules. However, working on the group projects, I learned how important the effect of group meeting and cooperation is. The more we worked on together as a team, the more our report would seem more logical and feasible. Although, some assignments that are given in this class might seem worthless and waste of time, this class surely sets the ground works of basic engineering skills for future engineers.