Wrapping up the first Week

Week 1 is now complete.

I expected things to be hectic, but I didn’t expect that I would be constantly exercising my brain for more than 10 hours everyday.

The very first week (Week 0) you would expect that there would be an orientation and the rest of the day off… but after a 1hour introduction about the reason this program is happening and the way it is structured, we dove straight into learning Autodesk Inventor and how the Laser Cutting machine works.
I had never used Inventor before and was finding it quite hard to use… So as soon as I came to know that the Laser Cutting software accepts outlines in .svg as well, I switched to Illustrator faster than Donald Trump can say “We’re gonna build a wall”
Needless to say, I was able to make the same thing in 1/10th the amount of time.

By the end of the day, we had successfully written the name of the program along with multiple variations of @
However, we also learnt about gears, gear ratios and assemblies and had to come up with something that solves a problem.

Now halfway through the week, almost all of us 20 people were beat. We had been doing assignments back to back every night while learning new software and how to use different machines.

While everyone was discussing how they’re going to chill and and spend the rest of the evening suddenly our professor shows up and tells us, with a smile, to check our email.

We had been given yet another assignment. This one would not only require a culmination of all the skills we had learnt so far, but also learning how to operate a micro-controller and build a drawing robot catchy-ly titled 'Build A Drawbot’. We were supposed to work in teams of two to complete a fixed objective, but also free to add whatever extra features we wanted to have in our drawbot.

The next two days were a blur… and I still don’t know how we managed to pull off the Drawbot and were the only team whose drawbot could actually draw the assigned shape.

The stakes were high for this one as well since this Alan and Eric (the 2 professors who founded this program) flew down from New York on the day we were expected to complete. They liked all the work we did had pulled off throughout the week. Eric even mentioned that he gives this very drawbot assignment to his class to complete in 3 weeks.

After seeing all of our drawbots, they went on to give us a small outline of the coming 6 weeks. After they finished briefing us, they told us to come up with ideas for inventions by Monday. So we basically were supposed to spend the entirety of Saturday and Sunday just thinking.

They mentioned that the real work begins now. I look at my Drawbot sitting across the table, made over 2 sleepless nights with multiple possibilities considered and designed for…
If this wasn’t even considered real work, I can’t wait to see what’s in store.

Read the next part here.