Item 2

Creativity is an extremely important attribute for a design engineer. Great designs do not spontaneously show up on a piece of paper, they start in one’s mind. For a design competition required for a 3^rd year CAD course, I was able to come up with a unique design which placed my group in the top 10 out of 60. We were ranked on a light-weight basis, i.e. the winner was the lightest structure which saved the eggs.

The competition was named “egg drop soup”. Required by the team was to protect a platform of raw eggs from a can of dropped soup. However, to make it more difficult is that our proposed design could not touch the ground or the platform which the eggs lied on. A schematic of the “arena” is seen below.

A majority of the class developed a rigid, truss-like structure. However, I quickly realized that these structures proved to be very heavy and in-efficient. I quickly came up with a “cantilever” like design which was very light weight and most efficiently used that designated material. My proposed is shown below. 

This item exemplifies my ability to come up with novel ideas. The ability of coming up with ideas is crucial for a design engineer. Being a design engineer is much more than analytical skills, all the analytical skills in the world won’t help, unless you’re a scientist. Finally, I understand that I need to continue to do design work. I understand that this is a skill learnt through experience. I will design until the day I die. So say we all!