This week was filled with interactive and informative workshops. We had the opportunity to participate in various workshops led by amazing individuals from a broad range of backgrounds and experiences. The workshops varied from design workshops to professional development, all preparing us to take on the challenges in the forthcoming weeks and beyond. We started off the week with a workshop for user-defined scales and design criteria. I have had some experience working with these design elements the summer prior to this and absolutely find them to be an integral part of the engineering design process. That’s why I was happy to see that this workshop was included in the internships to help guide us in effectively defining our design criteria. Later in the day we had a workshop teaching us about the importance of listening and communication. The remainder of the week was structured similarly, a delicate balance between technical and soft skills.

One workshop that particularly stood apart from the others was the difficult conversations workshop. More specifically, one point that stood out was that oftentimes we argue for the sake of winning. The problem with this is that they fail to sincerely consider the other party’s perspective. In this sense, effectively nothing comes of the argument. This is something that happens frequently within teams.The rest of the week was scattered with workshops and meetings. The meetings were particularly important to guiding our research and clarifying our ultimate goal. On Tuesday we met with Alex, a veteran who gave us important insight into some of the duties and tasks carried out by infantrymen. On Wednesday, we met with Grant, one of the leaders on the Smart Helmet projects. On Friday we met with paul, an air force veteran, who helped who gave us some important insight on how haptics can be effectively used for pilots.

In all the variety of workshops that helped us hone our technical and soft skills that we can use for the not only the remainder of our internships, but also our careers.