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!

Christmas Break

Christmas break is finally here! This means that we can all enjoy a few weeks off from getting up early and being efficient workers. However, this doesn’t mean that we can take couple weeks off from learning! Since we are all life-long-learners at IRE, I can only imagine that there will be many learning activities completed by our students over the break. We can apply our heat transfer knowledge to decrease the heat loss out of our fish houses. Or maybe some of the electrical engineering students will make a fancy circuit to catch Santa Claus in the act of delivering our presents. Whatever situation we find ourselves in I’m sure we’ll come up with some way to make it better.

Proofread by Ron.

Co-op at United Taconite

As a student at IRE I have had the unique opportunity to have a three semester long “co-op” as a reliability engineer with United Taconite. I am going to graduate at the end of fall semester 2012, and then continue to work in this position at United Taconite. In my first semester in this co-op, I have been required to write documents on the different steps in the design process, as every student at IRE does every semester. The main difference here is when on a project team working on a project at IRE, the team collaborates to create this document, and it is written on the one semester long project they are working on. As a reliability engineer, I do not work on large, many months long projects. They are much smaller in scale. They also do not appear to fallow the design process. In the beginning of the semester I did not know how I was going to do this. After a few projects, I tried to sort them out and apply different steps of the design to the different projects. This is the method in which I wrote most of the documents needed at IRE. Through this writing, and putting them all together into a technical report I made a discovery. A small project done by a reliability engineer does fit the design process! It was not at all intuitive, but through a lot of reflection and drawing relationships I found it to fit quite well. This got me thinking about how versatile this process really is. It can be applied to almost anything. Not every problem uses all of the steps, but this process is a logical way to approach any issue or problem. The scope can be years or it can be days, either way the design process still applies.

Congratulations

Today the Generation 1 students were down at Minnesota State Mankato to receive their diplomas. This day marks a huge achievement for each individual student, as well as for the program. The students earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering. They are the first graduates in the state of Minnesota to receive a degree from a program founded on the principals of project based learning, and likewise IRE is a first of its kind in the state. From everyone at IRE, I would like to say congratulations to all the Generation 1 students who have helped mark this day in history.

Proofed by: Ron Ulseth

Finally Graduating

For those of you who have been following since the beginning, the first generation students are finally graduating. From our perspective this seems to have taken a very long time: Just two years ago we were just getting ready to start our first semester here. We have come along way, and I know that I am a better person from my journey through the last two years with this program.
All of the first generations students are excited to start their engineering careers we began preparing for so long. We are ready. Here we come.

Proofed by Matt Hudson

Society of Hispanic Engineering Conference

Iron Range Engineering gives the students an opportunity to develop their professionalism by attending leadership conferences. Cari and Carissa recently attended a conference in Anaheim, California.

The conference was geared towards developing the Hispanic engineering community, but we still got a lot out of it. The conference ran for two days and there was a career fair the following day. We attended ten different one hour workshops as well as get some volunteer hours in helping with registration for the conference. In the workshops topics such as interviewing, resume writing, and balancing work and home life were discussed.

This conference helped us to see how many different places and things an engineer can do. Companies as different as BP and General Mills sent representatives to the conference to teach young engineers about various. One of the most informative workshops we attended was sponsored by Lockhead Martin, a weapons company, which was titled Networking 101 for college students. This was important because we went to company sponsored hospitality suits where there were recruiters available to talk to about jobs. We attended these on Thursday night and had no idea what to say. We decided after that, we needed to attend a networking workshop to be more prepared for the career fair on Saturday.

Also in preparation for the career fair, we had our resumes critiqued. The biggest thing they wanted to see on our resumes was a project description, especially if there was no engineering related work experience. The career fair was a new experience for us. We were able to meet with representatives from different companies, hand out our resumes, and get some cool “swag”.

The conference was an overall success and a great opportunity to see different things available to an engineer. We both enjoyed getting companies’ point of view on what they are looking for in their new hire engineers. We will take the things we learned at this conference, build on them, and use them throughout our careers.

By Cari and Carissa

Dyssynchrony Project

It has been roughly one year since the start of the dyssynchrony project. The focus of this project is to mathematically model dyssynchrony in the heart, create a physical model that shows dyssynchrony, and write journal publications on the research that has been done. After one year, two of the three goals have been accomplished at a high standard. These being the mathematical model and the program developed, as well as the journal publications that have been submitted to Mankato State's Undergraduate Research Center. The mechanical model, although completed, is not able to produce desired physiological results of dyssynchrony. But experimentation can still be done, and so far, the results are viewed to be life like. Our team is now putting together the final report for mondays final design review and looking forward to getting more accurate results with the mechanical model.

Proofed by: Andrew McNally