Personal Growth

Personal Growth: what strengths and weaknesses did you learn about yourself? How are you different now?

The strengths I learned about myself were:

1. I’m apparently a very talkative person, I’m not scared to ask for opinion  or help from our community or someone out of our class. I actually enjoy socializing.
2. During our team conversations, I can often come up with creative ideas toward our project, yet figure out ways to let them work. Also because I have two awesome teammates, my ideas were often inspired by what we have said during the conversation.
3. I’m very action-oriented, as soon as our team came up with an idea I will get my hands on it immediately. 

The weakness I learned about myself were:

1. I can be super impatient, for example I often pull out the material from the oven even though it wasn’t completely melted. 
2.  I’m not as fluent in the software we used as Steve is, I wish I could have learned more about those skills so I could have done more. 
3. My time management can be horrible sometimes, for example we were supposed to meet at 5pm and I probably will be late for like 30 minutes. Also thanks Steve and Scarlet for always forgive me and being patient to my nonsense! Lots of love to y’all!

 

 

Civic Engagement: what did you learn about the approaches of working on a project? For example, teamwork, communication, understanding needs, etc.

The thing I learned was understanding our client’s needs is the most important during the whole process. If we never figure out what their needs are in the beginning, we will never be able to produce products that will satisfy them.

As for the team, I think it is important to have respect for each other. We need to understand that each one of us has our own expertise and specific strength, no one is above another. Only when we all contribute our strength to our project we can accomplish it.

For the communication, I feel that it is important to stay in touch with the community, and get their feedbacks timelu. We won’t be able to keep improving our product if didn’t regularly talk and visit our community, also thanks to the community for always responding to us rapidly. 

Academic Learning: where did the community experience align or not align with the academic content? What have you learned as a result? 

i could be wrong, but I felt like they actually want the wood-made tong more than they want the ABS-made tong. They cared more about whether the tong can pick up the trash, but what we learned in the class is we also need to use recycled materials to make the tong, but the community probably didn’t care that much about if it was made by recycled materials. Anyway, I learned that we need to combine our client’s need with our deisgin ideas, and even give up something from our side.