With the Innovation Expo coming up in just over two months, one Senior Design team looking to get a head start held its first team meeting this week to lay out some team rules. The mixed-major team laid out some rules for who would be responsible for taking notes at meetings, scheduling meetings, and other administrative tasks. They also had a quick call with their advisor to get some ideas for projects they could work on for the rest of the semester.
The first task is going to be getting licenses and learning how to use some simulation and design software that they’ll need. Little do they know, they won’t actually get access to it until the day before the final presentation, at which time they’ll have to do their entire project in a day. The software is also for simulating processes they have never learned about and requires floppy disks to store data. They will probably find out about the floppy disks in a couple of weeks and have to visit an antique store to get some.
We caught up with the group to get more of a timeline of their plans for the rest of the semester.
“Well over spring break we’re all going on a cruise together, so nothing is going to happen that week. And then we have another cruise planned for the week after. Actually, I think there’s like five week long cruises that we’ve planned in the remaining nine weeks,” the group member in charge of time-sensitive lab experiments told us. “I think someone will have to go into the lab and take manual readings from the Positron Emission Topography Actiniometer 8540 for us. Maybe my roommate will be willing to.”
We checked with the roommate who said “what is a Positron Emission Topography Actinometer 8540,” and then we said, “not sure, sounds made up.”
Part of the problem might be their project. With four majors involved, the plan to design a medical device for breathing that also can move robotic arms to simulate body language over zoom while predicting properties of a solids mixing operation and also being a website at the same time made it a little difficult to make much progress. Because how would all of that happen at once? “Honestly, we have no idea how this is going to work. The plan for our poster is just to take some pictures of cool sciency-looking things that may or may not have been involved in our project and just tell anyone who will listen about how revolutionary it is.”
Things only got worse when they lost their binder. A few days after our first interview with whoever seemed to be the leader for that week, the binder with all their notes mysteriously disappeared. “All our minutes! Literally minutes of work have been lost! There’s no way we can remember who was supposed to schedule the next meeting again. We won’t be able to have literally any more meetings,” they told us frantically. We were a little confused because all four of them were there and could have had another planning meeting right then, but apparently, that was out of the question.
We do wish this group the best of luck as they try to do an entire project in a third of the time, but we’ve decided to stop answering their calls because we don’t know anything about the project they’re now asking us for help on. We’re so excited to see all the cool pictures and software screenshots that were most likely made in PowerPoint on their poster and see how they tie everything together.
