XLIX

Engineering Design Firm

9201 University City Blvd
Charlotte, NC 28223

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1201 006
Dan Latta
Hollyann Walker
Dane Mann
Whole Life Concepts Project Report

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submitting:

Date
11/6/15

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Description
Whole Life Concepts

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Description

Whole Life Concepts Project Report

Dane Mann
Introduction to Engineering Principles and Practices 1
ENGR 1201-006
11/06/2015

The goal of this project was to identify my passion and figure out how to apply it in a
career as an engineer. To figure this out, I studied from a variety of sources. I
talked to upperclassmen in the engineering program to gather information about
the courses that I needed to take and how their passions have been used. I have
also taken the Strong Interest Inventory test to help identify my passion. I have also
gone on a popular engineering forum on the site,
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/. I would like the outcome of this project to
directly affect my course of action with my studies at UNCC. Since I have discovered
my passion, I can now formulate a plan to complete my studies in an organized
manner. s. This will ultimately make me want to work on achieving my goal more
often.
I believe that my individual passion is better defined as a value and that value is
working hard. I have come to appreciate working hard at my goals in order to see
results. If I have a large task, I will break it into smaller parts and work hard at
completing it. I believe I have had this passion for about two and a half years. When
I was in my junior year of high school, I started to work out in order to be better at
throwing shot put. I soon became infatuated with working out because I could push
myself to the limit and see immediate results of my labor. Sometimes during my
workout, I would push myself to do 250 pushups, 400 curl ups, jog a mile, do three
sets of squats, and sprint a quarter of a mile. I saw that I could make rapid progress
just by setting short term goals and putting all my effort in completing the goal.
Some would say this sounds like instant gratification, however, I would argue that
this is the complete opposite. I believe instant gratification means you achieve or
obtain your goal with no effort. Some people might also say that my passion is bad
for long term goals. I can remedy this by setting a long term goal and then breaking
it down into smaller more achievable goals. For example, I have worked on this
paper at the pace of one paper a day so that I can see my progress and be inspired
by it. I am able to complete in a timely fashion without getting tired.
As previously mentioned in the paragraph above, my training during track allowed
me to appreciate the value of putting full effort into whatever I undertake. My dad
helped me during this time. He assisted me in my workouts and encourages me
during my training. Both of my parents came to my track meets in order to give me
encouragement. For me, track was not about the score, but getting better and
seeing the fruits of my labor. This has caused me to keep my work out habits today
as I constantly challenge myself to meet goals. For this project I took a Strong
Interest Inventory assessment. The type of interests I had were centered on careers
that involved hard work.
I did not always value hard work.. Before my junior year in high school I hated work
outs. I wouldnt exercise and I was a very lazy person. I spent huge amounts of
time on my computer playing video games getting nowhere in life. However, this all
had changed within a couple of weeks. In high school, I was in a class called JROTC.
This class was funded by the military and was focused on making students better
citizens. In the past, the physical activities I participated in were games like
football, soccer, and kickball. There was not any major exercise going on, just play.
That all changed one week when our senior army instructor, or SAI for short,
decided to make us go back to doing actual exercises. It was a hard transition, but
this allowed me to see how a little extra effort allowed me to get better. This made
me want to exercise.

I wish to impact the world around me by working hard through assisting non-profit
organizations, helping with events that benefit schools in the community I will be
living in, and bringing awareness to young adults and teens about the STEM
careers. Using my passion of working hard for short term goals I can volunteer at
non-profit organizations, because they are always in need of hard workers. I also
want to help schools in the area I will live in by using my influence with the
company I will be working at to fund the math and science departments of the local
schools. They could even provide some type of engineering course. When I was in
high school there was a robotics class that was funded by the local businesses who
wanted to generate interest in STEM programs. So it can be done. I can also bring
awareness to teens and young adults by doing this. I can use websites that allow
prospective students to interview me. For example, on the website www.reddit.com,
there is a forum that allows students to interview an engineer and also has
questions that are answered by engineers on it.
In ENGR 1201, there are a variety of issues that are presented in engineering today.
Although I cannot say that these necessarily affect my passion, I feel that there are
three issues that I want to tackle in my career. The three issues I am interested in
deal heavily with the theory of collective knowledge. This theory states that the
more humans there are, the faster we progress. This is affected by technology
heavily. The first of the three is advanced personalized education. This a grand
challenge for engineering in the 21st century. I am passionate about this because I
believe that currently education is slow and not personal. What I mean by this is
that it takes more than twelve years to go through a typical public school system.
By the time a student completes high school, he or she may have had more than
100 teachers . On top of this, each teacher is assigned approximately 50 students.
There is little personalization in this. When students cycle through teachers, they
never get taught the way they should thus, slow to minimal progress is made. This
can be solved with computers and software that can track how students learn. This
will allow all students to learn quicker than they would with a regular teacher. This
in term creates a more educated society and allows for rapid advancements in not
only math and science, but the arts. The second issue I want to tackle is food
security. I want to help with this because the US sends so much foreign aid to third
world countries. If we help make them self-efficient then we dont have to send
them aid anymore and they can keep a well fed population. The third issue I would
like to tackle is the grand challenge of engineering the tools of scientific discovery. If
this issue is resolved then breakthroughs in science will happen at a more rapid
pace. With the internet bringing exponential growth in discovery who knows what
these tools will bring.
Some skills and knowledge that I will need to make the impacts above and turn my
passion into a career will mostly be based on team and interpersonal skills. I will
need to work in a team as a team member not as an individual in a team. This
means I should set the success of the group above my own success. I will need to
be able to fit in with the norms of the company I will be applying for and work with
the people who are a part of my team who have no knowledge of engineering, but
have knowledge of their specialty. Writing will also be very important in my career
because as ENGR 1201 has gotten us to know we must be good writers to be
engineers. We almost must be good readers as most communication is done without
face to face interactions. Also when reading technical reports by other engineers it
is important to know what they are saying. A career in engineering will also require

being good at giving presentations and knowing proper public speaking skills. I will
need a lot of technical knowledge as well. This includes all the classes I will be
taking at my time at UNCC as well as knowing how to use programs that help with
the engineering process. Some of these are CAD programs, MS Project, MS Visio,
and programming interfaces like notepad.1
Since my sophomore year in high school I have aimed to receive an education in
electrical engineering. Since I was little, I had always wanted to be some sort of
engineer. In high school I had been in a class called PLTW. This class was a class
aimed at getting students ready to be engineers. It involved multiple projects where
you had to create robots or systems that would perform a pre-determined task.
Since starting the class my team had assigned me the job of programming the
machines. I liked this. I used these experiences to help me choose my major.
Another reason I picked the major was because of the pay and the job opportunities.
In a paper I wrote my junior year in high school, I had to explore my future job I
wanted. So I chose Electrical engineering. I read about how there were a lack of
electrical engineer students and how the starting pay was sixty thousand dollars a
year. The thought of having financial security furthered my interest in electrical
engineering. The question I have about this major is how to get a good job straight
out of college besides making good grades and doing co-ops. I intend to find this
out by talking to recent graduates who have good jobs and studying their course of
action during their education.
Since my passion relates to work rather than an object of interest all I need to learn
is the soft skills and the educational material needed in my career. These
educational materials are my college education and the application of this
education in real world situations. One of the benefits of putting your best effort
into what you do is that you know you have put forth your best effort. There is no
insignificant job and if a person does his job to the best of his ability, there is
satisfaction in that. I dont believe there is one specific academic program for me. I
will put my very best effort into what I do. In order to do what I want to do with my
life, I will pursue a degree in electrical engineering. In this course I will be taking 21
hours of general education, 12 hours of technical electives, 15 hours of
mathematics, 14 hours of natural sciences, 3 hours of math or science electives, 8
hours of engineering and 54 hours of courses that relate to my major. The sciences I
will be taking include physics, chemistry, geology, and thermodynamics. Physics
and chemistry will have labs. The mathematics I will be taking is calculus,
differential equations, and statistics for engineers. The 21 hours of general
education include multiple liberal studies, a university writing course, a social
science, and an elective. I also will be in classes that directly affect my knowledge
of my future career. These courses can be broken up into three groups, groundwork,
tools, and application. Classes that help with getting me with engineering processes
and getting me ready for future classes in my major are the ground work classes.
Some examples of these classes are ENGR 1201, ENGR 1202. Classes that involve
me learning information that I will use in labs and projects are the tools classes.
These classes help get me ready for the application classes. Some tools classes are
PHYS 2101, ECGR 2103, and MATH 2241. The application classes are the classes
where I will put most of what I have learned in the past classes to solve real world
problems and apply the knowledge obtained in projects. Some examples of these
classes are ECGR 3253, ECGR 4123, and ECGR 3159. This academic program will

help me make my desired impacts seen in page 1 paragraph 5 by giving me the

knowledge to do my job so I can make connections in order to help my community.
To make the impacts I have stated on page 1 paragraph 5 I will need to gain
knowledge while here at UNCC. Since the impacts I want to make involve a lot of
public relations with community, I should take a course under the communication
umbrella like COMM 1101 public speaking. I will also have to do some persuasion to
so COMM 3101 persuasion will also help. Another way to reach the impact of
bringing awareness of STEM careers to young adults is to create a website. In order
to do this it would be very beneficial to learn how to program in HTML. Classes like
ITIS 2300 Web Based development would help greatly.
Since I will be doing a plethora of non-technical work, I will need to find help in
sources that arent strictly academic. These sources could be my family, friends,
and colleagues.. I believe my family and friends can help me with making the
impacts said above by providing me moral support. They can help me stay inspired
as during difficult times. My employer will help me sustain my housing and may
help out the local schools if I can generate any interest in helping kids explore STEM
careers. It is not impossible after all. Not only did my school have a robotics course
sponsored by the local industries, but we also had a scholarship program for
students who wanted to obtain a degree in engineering. This degree allowed the
selected student to take college courses in high school while having a paid
internship after school.
My passion was to work hard towards short term goals. I plan to use my passion to
affect society positively by setting short term goals that are aimed at making the
impacts I want to make. These impacts will positively affect society by bringing
more students into STEM careers and allow for faster discoveries and rapid growth
in knowledge. This will allow not only the area I live in to prosper a bit more, but the
world to prosper as these new found advancements allow people in third world
countries to live better lives. I also believe that my passion can be applied to solving
the issues I am interested in like the need for advanced personal education as this
will also increase that rate humans discover new technologies.
The Whole Life Concept Model is important to my development at this current time
because this is the year where most peoples passion is put to the test. The Whole
Life Concept Model is centered on passion and without passion the Whole Life
Concept Model would be empty signifying how passion is imperative to have in
order to be successful. Without passion we are empty inside and we are just going
through the motions. Another important part of this model during the time I am at
UNCC is the knowledge ring as it is what I am going to college to obtain. This will
allow me to do the job I want to do and make the impacts I want to make. The
application ring is also important at this time as its basis will be determined in my
time here at UNCC as I will need to determine the morals that I believe I should
have and what really matters. In this paper we have gone over the all of the layers
of the Whole Life Concept Model and we see that I will apply it while at UNCC.
This assignment has affected my views on my choice of major by showing me what
it is that I truly value when I work. If I am to continue down this path that I am on, I
believe that I should not only apply my passion for hard work towards short term
goals by dividing up my work into manageable amounts, but also not to stress over

the small things. This will allow me to pursue my degree in a more effective manner
as I will be working the way I want to work. I feel that this assignment has also
affected my plans for the future because I will be able to work more effectively and
plan ahead and budget my time at work. I also believe my perception of what it
takes to become an engineer has changed. I see that it has more to do with soft
skills like interpersonal communication. To make an impact you need skills that are
not always taught in an academic setting, but learned from family members.
Since this assignment I have been thinking of my future. I am not more committed
to my major as I was before this assignment, but I am not less committed. I have
had multiple reasons for picking electrical engineering as my major and my passion
was not one I have considered until this paper. I would say that my passion is one
that can be used for any type of career. However, it is one that is best suited for
labor intensive careers like a farmer or lumber jack. However, like I stated above in
paragraph 4 on page 2 it can be used in all careers, but is mostly situated in hard
labor. I dont want to do this work because it does not pay well and is not as
enjoyable as thinking through problems. Therefore I will continue on with my
education in electrical engineering. Another reason I want to continue my degree in
engineering is to be someone that my future kids will look up to. I dont want to
have my kids question me when I tell them to go to college about why they should if
I did not. I also feel that electrical engineering poses a real challenge for me rather
than anything else outside of the college of engineering. This will help me grow as
an individual and future short term goals I will make will be easier to accomplish.

References
1. Leslie Coward, Balancing Technical and Non-Technical Skill Development
(presentation, Engineering Career Center, 11/4/2015