I love the day after Labor Day. To me this is the first day of spring fall. It’s cool enough you can open the windows, football is starting up and it just feels like everything is slowing down a little bit.
In college though, we didn’t get Labor Day off, and yesterday reminded me of all the dedicated students marching down to their classes to absorb vast amounts of knowledge. As an instructor, I didn’t like the pace of the SolidWorks college course. So here are some ideas for you college students (or parents wanting advice for their kids) that want a little more out of a course like SolidWorks, because believe it or not, that one course can be the foot in the door to a lot of possibilities.
Charge through the manual
You can get through the SolidWorks tutorials and beginner’s manual in two weeks easy, along with your other classes. If you spread it over the semester you’ll learn less. I taught SolidWorks at a University and it was terribly inefficient. I changed it up and added some other projects to reinforce the key concepts.
Help out other students
This is the single best thing you can do to learn more and improve the skill of others. You see how they work, they see how you work. You learn how to communicate and show things to others. Priceless.
Be a Lab Assistant
I did this and liked it. It gets you in good with the staff, gives you opportunities to help people out and you hear about what other people are doing and working on. This helped get me a summer co-op and eventually SolidWorks into the curriculum.
Help out on an Engineering Project
This could be helping a senior group with a project or a graduate student with some research. Jump in, pick something that interests you if possible. This gets you involved in figuring out solutions to real life problems, which you won’t usually get in the classroom.
Start a company
This could be a design service, engineering company or a company for your own product. You don’t know everything about mowing a lawn when you start a lawn service, but you learn quickly if you want to keep customers. Same here – Start it, learn, fail, try again. Getting a mentor can make it even more successful.
Start a Blog
Same as above. You don’t need 11 ½ years of industry experience. As far as I know there’s no student out there blogging about SolidWorks. Sure, it doesn’t have to be about that, but pick a niche you enjoy and have fun. That blog about rocket technology could end up getting you in the door at SpaceX or something. My only recommendation would be to use Wordpress and Hostgator.
With all of these the most important thing you can do is ask questions so you understand each situation. Even if you know a lot, never think you’re an expert so you’re always open to learning and gaining even more opportunity.
