After the first day, I realized I didn't have a lot of direction. I realized that I had no idea what I was going to be doing for my final project. I knew that a lot of the work was going to be independent, so I was really going to have to rely on myself quite a bit, but I didn't really know much about the engineering process, so I was going to have to work with my mentor on that. Yet, that also required me to catch him when he uwasn't busy as to not interrupt his work too much, but it seemed like he was always busy, so approaching him to work on moving further in the project seemed like a tricky task.
The beginning of today really felt just about the same. My mentor started me off with a general direction and then let me run with it while he was running all around doing his own thing. I attended a meeting that morning, and afterwards tried to catch him real quick, but to no avail. At this point, I did whatever I could so that I could stay on track for the most part, and waited for my moment to start figuring out what was next, and get out all the questions I had brewing.
Finally, my mentor tells me it's time to head off to lunch, but he has a meeting right after, so we had to get going. At this point, I was finally able to work with him and start to narrowed in on what needed to get done. After 2 hours of off-site meetings, which were actually really cool, I was finally ready to get kicking. It felt like I was just looking for a foothold the whole morning, and after lunch I had finally found it, and I was ready to get going.
With notepad and pen at the ready, I was firing on all cylinders working. My goal was to begin to look at pricing for photovoltaic (solar) systems. The idea was just to get an overall sense of what it was going to look like to calculate what installing one of these systems was going to cost. I was able to break it up into two parts: want and space. Want basically means how much solar paneling do you want to install on your building. This ties in quite nicely with space: how much space do you have for solar paneling. Put these together and you can begin to look at what kind of prices you are going to look at. The next part of this calculating process was to find how much energy a building consumes in year. When you have the price of the installation and the energy used, you can then begin to formulate how long it will take for you to pay off the installation fees.
With a good direction, I am really excited to finally begin to really get going on my larger project; to design a photovoltaic system for both my mentor's house and his workspace. I feel like the rest of these three weeks are going to both fun and somewhat difficult, trying to reach the deadline and keep up the massive amount of work that has to be done in order to design a whole system for two weeks. Still, I look forward to the hard work and dedication it's going to take to get this job done!
The beginning of today really felt just about the same. My mentor started me off with a general direction and then let me run with it while he was running all around doing his own thing. I attended a meeting that morning, and afterwards tried to catch him real quick, but to no avail. At this point, I did whatever I could so that I could stay on track for the most part, and waited for my moment to start figuring out what was next, and get out all the questions I had brewing.
Finally, my mentor tells me it's time to head off to lunch, but he has a meeting right after, so we had to get going. At this point, I was finally able to work with him and start to narrowed in on what needed to get done. After 2 hours of off-site meetings, which were actually really cool, I was finally ready to get kicking. It felt like I was just looking for a foothold the whole morning, and after lunch I had finally found it, and I was ready to get going.
With notepad and pen at the ready, I was firing on all cylinders working. My goal was to begin to look at pricing for photovoltaic (solar) systems. The idea was just to get an overall sense of what it was going to look like to calculate what installing one of these systems was going to cost. I was able to break it up into two parts: want and space. Want basically means how much solar paneling do you want to install on your building. This ties in quite nicely with space: how much space do you have for solar paneling. Put these together and you can begin to look at what kind of prices you are going to look at. The next part of this calculating process was to find how much energy a building consumes in year. When you have the price of the installation and the energy used, you can then begin to formulate how long it will take for you to pay off the installation fees.
With a good direction, I am really excited to finally begin to really get going on my larger project; to design a photovoltaic system for both my mentor's house and his workspace. I feel like the rest of these three weeks are going to both fun and somewhat difficult, trying to reach the deadline and keep up the massive amount of work that has to be done in order to design a whole system for two weeks. Still, I look forward to the hard work and dedication it's going to take to get this job done!