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My practicum took place at the Bioinspired Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory which is a campus based lab in Martin Hall. There were several different ways I was able to find out about this site. One such way was emails through the campus that pitch the VIPS course to which I was able to get connected. The other way, which I did, was emailing the director directly and asking if there were any ways to get involved to which I was informed of the specific VIPS course. For SGC scholars who want to get involved or are having trouble finding a supervisor my best advice is to look within your classes and major. Typically your professors have some sort of research or project they are working on simply because it's a research college. Go to office hours and ask about if they have anything that you can join. Similarly, ask teachers assistants as they very well could also be involved with research that you may be able to join. The last bit of advice for finding a practicum site is to join organizations that focus on networking. In aerospace we have AIAA that can generally apply to all engineering majors and is open to them meaning plenty of opportunities to network and see possible projects not only within but outside of the campus.
Due to the progression of the course/site my work mostly consisted of showing up to monday morning meetings and one or two different arranged lab times each week. At the meetings the goals for the week were established and assigned accordingly to each person. A majority of the time others were assigned the work as I was new to the overall process however where I did get a lot of work was the lab. In the lab there were 3 main parts: checking the print, preparing the print for testing, and then the testing process. Some things I learned on this site were some software skills such as Chitubox and Solidworks but also just some general hands-on work such as how to properly clean off chemicals in a lab so it can be handled without any safety concerns.
Beyond the scientific outlook there are a number of other ways the site has affected me, specifically my future plans for UMD. The experience was very hands-on which I appreciated, however, due to my new arrival I felt people were hesitant to assign me work in case I was incapable of performing it. This often left me a little unfulfilled as some hopes I had were that I could begin to apply a lot of what I had learned in classes to a lab space but never really got around to it. In the future I will likely be looking for other extracurriculars where I can be more involved and start getting more satisfaction in applying my skills. Similarly, my future career plans were more defined as I had always aspired to work on rovers or rotorcrafts but the component creation has been a little uninspiring. Perhaps with more time I could understand the satisfaction of creating a component and then getting to test it in a system to finally see it work out but with all the failures it was very demoralizing. Working with soft robots and autonomous vehicles is still interesting but maybe working on the smallest little intricacies of them, not so much.