Lessons Learned

Several lessons have been learned through the beginning of the senior design project. We have learned team building lessons, including team interaction, organization and team roles, through many trial and error situations. Issues of project management also have taught me very important lessons that will help me in the real world when I must deal with administrative authority.

As a team, we have never set specific roles for each team member, but rather naturally feel into our own roles. I, personally, have become a sort of optimist or gate keeper. I try to make sure everyone feels their opinion is heard and that everyone gets equal say in the design. I also watch to make sure that no one feels their toes are being stepped on by watching people's mannerisms during the meetings. I also have become somewhat of a meeting coordinator, in the sense that I contact all team members to find a time and location to meet that fits everyone's schedule. Our method of each team member taking the role that suits their personality best has come naturally, but I think there would also be some benefit in changing the roles so that each member can prepare for real world situations. When in the working world, I may be asked to lead a team, which is a role that is very unnaturally and unlike my personality, but the experience of learning to lead in a group like this would greatly benefit me when I have to lead in the future.

This project involves several aspects that really interest me. I plan on going into radiology, so learning about magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) from an engineering perspective is very interesting. I also enjoy applying what we have learned about tissue mechanics from Dr. Criscione and Dr. Humphrey into building an actual device. However, I do not like the added challenges of building such device inside a MRI. The space we have to put the device and the requirements of non-magnetic material have made the design process more intense that I expected.

I have also learned that I need a specific project completely outlined by a project manager to be most effective. Dr. Wright is an excellent project manager, but he has given a lot of the design requirement and specification decisions to our team. This leaves the limits of our design open-ended; therefore any design in my mind still seems incomplete because we could always add another aspect to the tissue conditioning. If Dr. Wright had given us distinct requirements we would

...