Waterloo is constantly touted as the most innovative school in Canada, at least by Maclean’s and often by ourselves. We just need to keep in mind that only a small part of that has to do with the school itself. The rest comes from the students. That may sound like a cliche, but the point is that we students, as budding innovators and inventors, need to learn more than what we are taught in our courses.
One of the easiest places that this can be seen, as well as the one I am most familiar with, is in electrical design. As a 4A mechatronics student, I have learned my fair share of electrical engineering concepts and have had a few opportunities to apply these in various labs. Still, there’s a huge difference between what we work on in labs and the kind of electronics projects that are so popular on hackaday, kickstarter, reddit, and wherever else people post their homemade or prototyped gadgets.
Now if you are anything like how I used to be, you might be intimidated by these gadgets. I mean, how could I possibly make a smart watch? Or an automated drink dispenser? Or a quadcopter from scratch? Well, I want to tell you that you can design these wonderful things and build them. You just need the motivation to try.
What I have found is that it turns out that being in engineering does prepare us for one thing extremely well, and that is learning. We are capable of taking on a project that we have no idea how to complete, researching the components, and learning how to do it ourselves. In electronics, for example, this could include how to program a microcontroller, how to get it to talk to some sensor over I2C or some other protocol, and making control systems that get it to do something cool. Any one of these could be covered as a topic in a course, but it’s a course where we have to be our own professor and the TAs.
Waterloo is changing; it used to be expected that the students would just naturally decide that their courses aren’t enough and that they should learn new skills on their own through personal projects. Naturally when you want to use machinery and are living in student accommodations these types of projects could be more than a little sketchy. Now we have places like velocity-especially the hardware focused foundry-as well as student teams and now Ridgidware (cough…cough you should check that out, CPH foyer, 11:30 to 1:30, Tuesday and Thursday). The goal is to help show you that you are capable of designing actual, practical things completely outside of school, regardless of whether this has to do with electronics, mechanical parts, or even other engineering disciplines. The trick is to get started and learn the necessary skills as you go along. That way, even if you don’t end up finishing your project, you’re still left with actual, real world applicable skills.
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