Cumulative reflection

The decision to transfer to Iowa State University wasn’t just about studying abroad. It meant
diving into a new world with struggles and tough but also better education, experiences, and
meeting with people. As a senior student in the Electrical Engineering department, I’m reflecting
on my experiences at Iowa State University to realize how time spent at Iowa State University will
change my future.
In this institution, I could have sufficient experiences to get off my comfort zone and
challenge myself to learn new cultures or knowledge to understand the world more clearly.
Especially to do this, I leveraged my general education classes to escape my comfort zone.
Impressive classes such as Chinese Politics and Western History I gave me a new perspective on
understanding global events, such as the distribution between U.S.A and China to take global
hegemony, and historical and cultural knowledge that made me understand more clearly about a
western society which I’m not 100 percent familiar with. Especially researching western
philosophers such as Aristotle, who built logical paradigms in Western society, was helpful in
understanding different approaches to seeing natural events or problems between Asian and
Western cultures since Western scholars created different logical paradigms to recognize nature.
It would be very helpful to better understand different cultures for me.
During my years at Iowa State University, I enjoyed taking lab classes from the Electrical
Engineering department, such as Signal and System II, Integrated Circuit Design, and
Microelectronic fabrication. Especially in classes like Signal and System II and Integrated Circuit
Design, I really like to work with my classmates to solve given problems and make functioning
devices. For example, in Signal and System II, we had to build a PID controller to build ball
balancing robot, so we analyzed physics laws that we had to care to make ball balancing robot,
design a filter to follow physics laws, and calibrate parameters to make balancing process smoothly.
This series of works was really enjoyable, and at that moment, I realized how engineers work to
solve problems.
Various projects from Integrated Circuit Design and Digital Logic classes also were great
experiences in solving engineering problems. The difference between these projects and lab works
was whether we had all the information to solve problems. In the case of projects, they must use
external sources to solve problems. For instance, we had to build 4 bits serial input DAC for the
Integrated Circuit Design project. To make this, we had to use various functions in Cadence
software which is widely used in the industry nowadays. Since we didn’t cover whole functions
within the lab section, we had to play with manuals and communities to implement the functions
we wanted to add. By finding useful resources from the internet, we successfully finished building
our 4-bit serial input DAC, and these skills in finding resources would save me time for future
work.
The most I surprised at Iowa State University is that I can get a lot of support from faculties
and staff members, and many programs encourage independent study in this department. It was
impressive since it was quite different from what I was familiar with in South Korea. Thanks to
faculty support, I could start researching gallium oxide Schottky barrier diode during my first
academic year at Iowa State University. I am doing honors independent research with Dr. Liang
Dong concerning memristor devices.
Collections of these experiences, I realized that I could gain various skills such as work
collaboration to solve engineering problems, defining engineering problems and devising solutions
from mathematical and physical reasonings, and finding out useful documents to get knowledge
and self-study. These skill sets will make me a better engineer not just by having some equations
and software skills for drawing circuits but also an engineer who can define engineering problems,
seek possible solutions by using given resources efficiently, and keep pursuing new knowledge
and skills from external sources such as wiki and communities.