I think that one of the big things that happened during my senior project was a sort of deviation from the initial path I had developed. Initially, I wanted my senior project to be much more focused on aerospace engineering, and while I did narrow in on that for about half of my project, the other half ended up reflecting my experiences with the intrepid to a much greater degree. I think I would have likely split my essential question into 2 keyframes. One almost identical to what I have, while the other would say something along the lines of “What was it like to serve in the navy?” “What are those long term effects?” “What can I learn by surrounding myself with that history?”
I think in a lot of ways I was very satisfied with the work I was doing during my senior project. The two paths it took (online work vs in-person work on the Intrepid) offered both meaningful (in person) experiences and a clear goal and path to follow (online). However, I also ended up not reaching my initial goal for the online portion of the work (which was to fully complete my two online courses). I think this happened for two main reasons. One was that the online aeronautical course ended up being much longer than I initially expected. The other was that my in-person work on Intrepid ended up being much more time-consuming than I expected.
I think the main challenge I faced throughout my senior project was staying motivated to complete my work. It is never hard to start a major project, yet staying with it and going all the way through a project is never easy.
I think going forward, I am going to remember mainly the proximity to engineering that going on board the Intrepid every day offered me. It is easy to forget as an engineering student that the decisions I make may highly impact someone else’s life. For example, the decision on board Intrepid to place the pilots’ ready room under the flight deck (for convenience purposes) ended up killing over a dozen men when a kamikaze attack hit. Or, for a more mundane example, the decision to have fluorescent light bulbs onboard the submarine Growler, although good from an engineering perspective, could cause people to lose track of their sense of time. So it is both the little things and the big things that add up and can change lives.
I think the main thing I want other people to know about my senior project experience is how accessible this history, and in some ways, this engineering is. While aerospace engineering may seem like a very daunting subject, the basic principles are easy to follow and easy to see executed. The same goes for military history! As complex and layered a subject as it is, it is a very human subject, with real people at the center of these stories, and so as long as you are willing to go out of your way and make those initial steps then you are sure to be rewarded.