Ethan Shoemaker

Cpr E 494

Cumulative Reflection

When I was deciding which university I wanted to attend, I had very different

priorities in terms of what the university can offer me. I am incredibly fortunate to have

found a school which meets both the priorities I had when I was a naive high schooler

and my priorities as a soon-to-be engineer. After having 3 very successful and

enjoyable years as a student at Iowa State, I have had the luxury of reflecting on my

experience and am incredibly grateful for the opportunities I was given.

For the first 3 years of college, I was still under the impression that my job out of

college would be all programming, problem-solving, and improving existing systems.

Now I know better; programming and problem-solving are just a means of delivering a

solution to a client in a team of diverse engineers. The first time in college in which this

is truly apparent is in the intro to embedded systems course. Embedded systems aside,

this course was my introduction to Design Thinking. Design Thinking really should be

the main focus of any engineering program. Sure you can do pair programming or split

a month long project into parts that individuals can work on, but the marketable skill I

gained was the ability to adapt the sensors and actuators to solve a problem in present

day.

The next class I’d like to talk about is the software development course. This

semester long group project course gave me experience with two extremely valuable

skills: Git (version control) and project management. This course also ties in with Design
Thinking but I want to cover other subjects for this class. At the end of the semester, my

teammates selected me as the best team manager for our group. I used my previous

experience in clubs and teams to help us delegate work and set deadlines for

components and subfeatures each week. Even though we weren’t following a strict

approach like Agile or Waterfall, the experience of working with the same group on the

same project with a deadline set way out in the future was truly eye opening. Since we

had to come up with a solution to a problem from scratch we had to develop ourselves a

complete system of components which could effectively interoperate to deliver to a user

with the features they want. The roadblocks we encountered such as us only being

sophomores with very limited experience only worked in our favor to further our

communication skills to overcome them.

Version control used to be a problem for software developers but it has since

been “solved” by things like Git, google3, VCS etc. I say “solved” because even though

a team uses one of these tools, doesn’t mean that conflicts and bugs won’t occur. A

team should establish a set of rules for submitting code, naming files, and the

Object-Oriented design they use. This class greatly reduced my ramp-up time at my

internship the following summer.

One of the best things I chose to do while in college was to serve as an

undergraduate teaching assistant for the sophomore level computer engineering

courses. This gave me 2 new learning outcomes that I would not have thought I’d have

gotten while still a student. First, observing students’ solutions to the same labs and

problems I had to solve when I was in their position and their process for coming to
these solutions really excited me. I was truly invigorated each lab period to see how

students would approach a problem, what questions they would ask, and how each

student would respond to difficulties. As I worked with the same problems and labs over

and over again, I would learn something new about the topic, something I hadn’t even

considered before. It was strange how I had taken this course already and thought I

learned everything there was to learn about it, but the students continued to teach me

new things.

Second, since each student was different, I became more and more aware that I

can’t help each student in the same way. Some students benefit more from me

explaining the idea or concept first and then how it applies to the specific problem they

were working on. Other students benefit more from me helping them solve their problem

first and then bringing it back to the concept they were applying without knowing it.

Furthermore, I noticed how easy it was for me to tell after working with these students

for weeks which ones were truly interested and wanted to be experts in the field. I’m

certain that I’ll be able to perceive similar vibes from my coworkers and teammates on a

real engineering team.

Having set times each week where I was responsible for facilitating the learning

of other students really helped boost my confidence. It made me more sure of my

knowledge of engineering, my presentation and communication skills, as well as the fact

that this field is right for me. Often times throughout the semester I would take actions

that were not required by TAs such as holding review sessions, asking particularly

talkative students about their feelings on the class, and meeting students outside of
office hours and lab. Each of those actions was positively received by my students and

it was truly rewarding that the risk I took to go above what was expected paid off.

If I were able to go back and change anything about my college career, it would

be to have tried to TA the classes in a sequence. For example the Cpr E core of 281,

288, 381, and 308. I find that working with people you already know or have worked

with before is much easier since there is no ramp up time for learning their habits and

what works best with them. Therefore, if I were able to be those students’ TAs for each

of those classes I would be that much more effective at teaching them.