Sunday, December 11, 2011

One Month's Reprieve

Following the end of all project and competency work on November 23 rd , IRE students were given a one week period in which to touch up all of their semester’s work into two compilations. The first compilation was the projects’ technical document, where all of the groups compiled everything that they had accomplished over the semester’s work. The second compilation was the individual student’s binders, where each student compiled all of their learning and professional accomplishments to assist in defending their semester’s learning. The following Monday (of December 5 th ) the project groups gave their final presentations to their peers and to some engineers from industry; followed by three days of straight defense for the individual students (and instructor’s too! J). For groups that had projects in industry, their presentations to their clients also happened during this two week period.


Now that the semester is finally over, I can stop to appreciate what I have done in the semester; however more importantly, I can take some time to observe what I have not done that I regret not doing, whether I was able to do them or not. However, while being able to just observe what went well, and conversely what didn’t, is rewarding for a student reflecting on his learning, taking the time to work on improving the process is at the heart of the IRE model. The consequence of being trained into the IRE model is that this process, dubbed Metacognition, becomes routine in everything that we as students (and for the first generation students as professionals) do in our work. So not only can I appreciate what happened over the semester, I can also ask “How can I do better?”


And on January 9 th we get to do it. Enjoy your break everybody!

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