<p>Hi,</p>
<p>I don't know if a thread like this has been made. I think it will be interesting to see what kind of assignments (projects, problem set contents in general terms) different engineering majors are doing or have done (within the classes for the major). I have not yet decided on a major, so I can't participate right now.</p>
<p>ok let's see...right now in my robotics class we are working on a wall following robot. But don't be under the impression that every class is this exciting..</p>
<p>That sounds interesting. It would be good if you could mention your major in your post as well.</p>
<p>I'm a materials science major and had some pretty cool projects/labs in undergrad.</p>
<p>Best one was easily the lab in my Microstructures II class. We were given 10 chunks of brass and 10 chunks of steel. The only instructions were "make one tougher, make the other harder." We had the entire semester to work out various heat/rolling treatments to try and improve those properties of our material (we also had to figure out what was actually going on and why the properties were changing). At the end of the course, we had to fit our entire lab writeup into six pages in the style of an academic paper to simulate writing a real paper.</p>
<p>I had another lab that was pretty neat where we got to try doing corrosion studies on various materials. It turned out that putting this one kind of dual-phase steel in HCl made all of the one phase get etched away and only left the other one in a matrix. You could actually see a 3d grain structure in what was left.</p>
<p>My senior capstone project was determining if it was worthwhile for this thin film company to try and enter the market of copper thin films. My group and I had to obtain samples from competing companies, develop tests to determine the quality of our company's product versus what current companies out there were making, and determining if the expected better quality of their material made up for the fact that theirs would cost a little more. (Their material wound up sucking, so it didn't matter how much it cost anyway, haha.)</p>
<p>There were also a bunch of neat one/two week labs, but they were generally less open ended than the three I just described.</p>
<p>CompE major. Have had some cool assignments.</p>
<p>Coded a media player application in Java. Operates just like Windows Media Player but only for music files. </p>
<p>Programmed a robot to follow a path and detect collisions using VHDL. </p>
<p>Right now in my embedded systems class we are programming a microcontroller (Atmega32) to read in the temperature using a DS1620 temperature sensor and display it to an LCD screen. It involves a lot of coding (using C now) and some wiring to connect the sensor to the microcontroller. In the end we are creating a sensor network using our microcontrollers so we can read the temperature from any client device and get the result displayed to the host.</p>
<p>My senior design course was to take an existing construction project (needed to be existing in order to obtain boring logs) and redesign it. We had to design the building and site, including the superstructure, foundations, drainage system, sprinklers systems, etc. We might have factored in lighting as well (I don't remember... been a while). We also had to do the construction management side of it, including cost estimates and scheduling. Also had to take financing into account. </p>
<p>The first semester was pretty much researching building codes, specifications, green design, zoning regulations, and other applicable codes and doing a preliminary design of the building. The second semester was when all the design and construction was done.</p>
<p>The project is as easy or as difficult you want to make it. Most teams ended up doing very difficult projects, which were quite time consuming, but most people enjoyed what they were doing. The interesting thing was we ended up have to learn some things on our own in order to design our building. Not everything is learned through lectures during undergrad; there's a lot more to engineering than you think.</p>
<p>Another interesting project I enjoyed was for my structural analysis course. We designed and built a 6 ft long steel bridge, which had to meet certain performance specifications. This was the most hands-on project we had, as we had to procure the raw material on our own and build it ourselves, including cutting the pieces down to size and welding and bolting the connections. It was a pretty sweet bridge!</p>
<p>If it isn't obvious, my major was civil engineering.</p>
<p>All of these assignments seem really interesting. These assignments really help me better understand what kind of work different engineering majors do.</p>
<p>I agree, this thread is awesome. Keep posting engineers, so that us uninformed high-school seniors/juniors know what we are getting ourselves into :) !</p>
<p>I just have a problem set for each class every week where I look in the book and then use math to solve problems.</p>
<p>Bump, to the greatest thread ever. Keep them coming I want to know what my doom will be!</p>