ME101, or Visual Thinking, is an engineering course at Stanford that is infamously laborious. Though it’s not known as the most difficult nor the most timing-consuming class, ME101 definitely has a reputation for requiring a significant amount of one of Stanford’s most coveted resources: time.
Though I may feel differently at the end of the quarter, after four weeks of this class I’ve crafted my own opinion. This past Monday, we turned in Design Project 1 (DP1), our first major undertaking of the class that we’ve been working on since the second day of class. After assigning teams and teaching us how to make different types of building joints with foam core, our instructors informed us we were to emulate a “hero’s journey,” with a “hero” (a marble) that began its journey by a team member pulling a string, journeyed through a homeland and unconnected three foreign lands, and started and ended at the exact same point. And with that, my team and I brainstormed, bought a lot of foam core, and started building.
The amount of trial-and-error we went through, from hot glue disasters to ill-fitting Exacto knife blades, was almost comical. I remember when a mechanically-complicated platform I had worked on for hours seemed to be falling apart, and I remember the moment when I realized a sliced rubber band would solve the problem. I remember taking a break with my team to get Late Night smoothies and food at a nearby dining hall during a six-hour excursion. I remember communication breakdowns and sassy retorts and vulnerability, and I remember the moment when our “hero” successfully completed a path from start-to-finish.
And it was so much fun. Yes, our first project took a lot of time. And yes, I didn’t get much sleep the nights before a checkpoint was due (especially the night before the final project was due). But to me, “time-consuming” has a negative connotation and suggests that the work is almost painful. I had a blast building and working with my team. I invested a lot of time, but I made some incredible memories.
I have difficulty determining how best to spend my time, to figure out which activities (or lack there of) should fill the spaces in my schedule. And I know I’m not the only one. It is unbelievably easy in college to be tempted to simply “have fun” by socializing at all hours of the day. And while it is so, so important to connect with people and to have those uniquely college moments, it is also important to feel like we’re making a tangible impact academically. Carrying my part of project, holding the assemblage of foam core that I devoted hours to building, felt incredible. I could hold what I built, and I had a substantial object to show for my efforts. I think papers, exams, problem sets, and almost every other difficult assignment are similar; I find that having a successful finished product is exciting because my hard work feels validated. While the journey of labor in of itself is rewarding, few moments are more satisfying than feeling proud of the end result.
Another huge learning experience immediately followed the Game Day when we showcased our project to our class and the teaching staff: the lesson of destroying what I built in order to make space for more successes in the future. After investing hours and hours into my foreign land, I almost carried the large block of foam core home with me. I trend towards keeping everything, because destroying it seemed so permanent, but then I asked myself where I would store my foreign land. Our dorm room already has such little space; I thought about giving it away as a present, but then realized that would place a burden on the recipient of my gift to keep it. Hence, my only option was to take several photos and videos and to keep a few mementos from the project. It was almost heartbreaking to watch my teammate’s foot sever my hard work (I couldn’t bear to smash it myself), but it was also almost cathartic; I knew that by reducing the space the object would take up, I could keep building more projects without hoarding. And thus, I established an important precedent of minimizing the space my projects take up in my life after they’ve served their purposes.
Even though I almost pulled two all-nighters for is this project, it was absolutely worth it. I hope I have more classes like ME101 where I truly feel like I reap what I sow (or build), and I hope everyone has a class where they can love doing hard work.
