Tuesday, July 25, 2017

My last Monday and Tuesday at Vandy

The laminating stage 
Yesterday was my last Monday at Vanderbilt. It was, as all others before had been, a really great day.

The first half of my class was spent working on cars, we were mostly doing the finishing touches. Leah and I were able to finishing making the supports for the seats and add a few other details. It was really exciting to see how well the car was coming together, and how well everyone else’s were coming too. By the time lunch rolled around we were mostly focusing on testing everything out, but we would have to continue this tomorrow as our next activity was a field trip.

We had the opportunity to tour a prosthetics manufacturing company called Amputee Inc. During the tour we were shown the three main stages that go into making prosthetics, those being the mold making phase, the first time the plastic is poured, and the final lamination stage.

My favorite part of the tour was seeing how they used various forms of technology to make the molds in the first place, while taking physical casts is common, many practices now use a scanner and CAD software to create molds. I had the opportunity to try scanning my hand with the software, it was pretty cool to see how technology like this works first hand. 
Me scanning my hand
At the end of the day we had SOFT time, I went to Ben and Jerry’s with some friends for a nice cold treat on such a hot day. It was a fun end to such a full day.
Our (almost) finished car
We finally got our finished story books 

Today was also really busy. We worked on our cars for the first few hours of class and had a quick lecture on basic mechanics, and then were getting our lunches at commons and heading off on another field trip.



Today we visited the Nissan Smyrna manufacturing plant. There we went on tour and got to see all the different steps that go into the creation of six different Nissan cars. The plant is laid out in an assembly line fashion, with robots and people doing different jobs. The robots were the most surreal part of the tour, it reminded me of a scene from a sci-fi movie with all of the actions the robots were seamlessly preforming. It was interesting to see how the plant is laid out and functions overall as it’s gigantic and produces massive amounts of cars every day.


It was even more interesting when, after we got back to Vanderbilt, we had a discussion about the similarities and differences between Nissan and Permobil. Each have similar long term goals, mobility, but one is much more specialized and on a much smaller scale. 

After class we had some free time, which was followed by our last proctor group night. My proctor group decided to stay in, order pizza, and watch Tangled. It was nice spending some time together as a group as the next few days will likely go by fast, though I hope that isn't the case. 

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