Cumulative Reflection

Tyler Imboden
Throughout my time at Iowa State, I have gained many problem-solving skills that will be useful
in an engineering environment. Most of these skills were obtained through technical classes
such as CPRE 281, 288, 308, 381 and so on. In this essay, I will discuss some specific problem-
solving skill I have gained and how I have applied these skills in the real world.
While most of the technical classes I have taken at Iowa State have revolved more around the
Computer Engineering discipline, I think that the Electrical Engineering classes provide a skill set
that enables a computer engineer to engage more with the design of a product. For example, I
interned at a small company consisting of about 15 engineers. This meant that I worked with
all disciplines of engineers. In this role, it was crucial that I had at least a basic understanding of
all the aspects of design. The skills I developed in designing and building circuits in the electrical
engineering classes helped to work directly with electrical engineers to diagnose problems in
equipment and returned products. I also was able to use these skills to design and build several
automated testing fixtures using PLCs. The electrical engineering courses helped me to wire
the PLCs and I programmed them using the information I learned in digital logic class. You can
program them using block diagram software similar to Quartus and it directly related to what
we did in lab in CPRE 281.
Another technical skill I have formed at Iowa State is the ability to write and debug software.
Almost every technical class I have taken involved some amount of writing code. From the start
in CPRE 185 we learned about how to write C code that could interact with the hardware on an
Arduino Esplora. This class helped to solidify my coding skills so that I could continue to COMS
227, where we learned how to write object-oriented code. The skills gained in these two
classes proved to be necessary moving onto COM S 228 and 311. Both of these classes involved
writing Java code which involved data structures and algorithms. CPRE 308 also involved
writing C code that gave me experience with how an operating system works and also gave lots
of experience of working in a Linux environment. While I havent used my coding skills directly
in industry yet, they are proving to be useful so far in senior design. We are working on
creating an autonomous quadcopter. The goal is to provide a demo that showcases what we
have learned during our time at Iowa State. Therefore, we have been looking at a lot of
embedded software, most of which is written in C. This project is also requiring me to learn to
take an existing project and understand and to improve on the project. This will prove to be
necessary in industry as I will most definitely as some point have to look at other peoples code
and debug it.
As can be seen, I have already applied many of the skills I have learned at Iowa State. Through
both project work and internship experience I have put these skills to use. Looking back at my
time at ISU, it is surreal to think about what all I have learned and how I can use my new skills in
the workplace in the future.