Saturday, March 7, 2020

Course Reflection


When signing up with class, I truly was not sure what to expect. From the course description, the material of the class didn't really seem like it would be relevant to my major or helpful in bringing me towards my goals. Regardless, I signed up for the course as I needed the upper level elective credits and was curious what an intelligent building was. 

Now after taking the course, I certainly don't regret it. The structure of the class gave me a lot of freedom in reading the type of articles I was interested in and picking what kind of project I would complete for my term project. I was able to use this freedom to learn more about the topics I'm specifically interested in and how they relate to the field of construction. The term project provided me the opportunity to complete a project very relevant to my major that helped me to expand my current skillset. The experience working with time series data will certainly be beneficial to me in working professionally and on my personal projects. Additionally, I learned many things that likely won't be relevant to my line of work but that I found interesting and refreshing. One very interesting thing I got to learn about was BIM. I had the opportunity to learn about the different industries BIM is used in and some of the primary troubles found in its adoption. Through this process, I learned how to design a simple house within BIM.

I really enjoyed learning from the professor who taught this course. Professor Mitchell did a great job presenting a very large variety of material in a short period of time. He kept a very open mind and seemed to genuinely care about the well-being of his students. He did a good job maintaining the attention of the students in his course and regularly asked for feedback from students to help guide the course. I am very happy I took this course for one of my higher level elective courses and feel that this course will definitely be beneficial to me in my career and personal life.

I agree, it is really crazy how fast this term went! I think it's great you were able to expose yourself to relational databases in the course and think this will be beneficial to you as an architectural engineer. This course definitely gave a good overview of relevant modern technologies.

I was in a very similar spot to you coming into this course as a non-architectural engineering major. I agree with you that this course was very eye opening to some of the applications of modern technology to the world of building design. I hope you can use what you learned to better the world.

It is truly crazy how many different topics we were able to cover in just a ten week period of time. I agree with you that getting exposure to blogs was a valuable experience. It was a form of communication I had always heard of but never new much about. I think the blog posts did a job getting students thinking.

4 comments:

Pritesh said...

Michael,
We share a similar view. I think the professor has really done a great job at delivering the concepts of intelligent building. I really appreciated that he invited professionals that work in the field to share their experience with us in the class. I wish more and more classes at Drexel incorporated this.

Isabel Brooks said...

Michael,
I like that you highlighted how this class provided some freedom to look into things we individually found interesting. There was a certain level of guidance of course that led the class through the right topics and down the right path but it was helpful to have free reign to look into things that seemed interesting if you wanted to. I agree that Professor Mitchell did a great job tying a lot of topics together and regularly asking for feedback helped the students feel heard. Great post!

Jake Hall said...

Michael,
You're definitely right that the professor did a great job covering a large amount of material in the quarter. I think regularly asking for feedback is very important for professors to do. Course evaluations are okay but the real-time feedback gives better results since I know when I do course evaluations I can't always remember which parts of the class are good and bad.

Elvira-Marie Mikhael said...

Michael,
I completely agree that the class structure of Intelligent Buildings provided a lot of freedom. Though I did not think the course would apply to my field of interest, Professor Mitchell did a great job of making the class relevant to many majors and topics and allowed students to explore best practices in the industry or interest of their choosing. Many of my blog posts that involved research ended up relating to the impact of ____ on sociology or people or jobs, because those things interest me the most. I wish more professors took the time to get real-time feedback from their students like Professor Mitchell has.