Letter to Department Help
Rachel Northey
Good morning professor,
Below is the letter that we have been working on to give to the department after our expereinces with the E3 Machine Shop. Can you read through it and give us some feedback before we send it?
Thank you,
Rachel
Hello,
This email is regarding our fourth year design project. We recently had interactions with the shop in E3 to help build our final prototype as they had the tools and machines needed to accurately create our design, where the student shop in E5 could not teach us how to accurately build our project. We had approval to do this but when it came to completion we had some troubles. Our complaint is two-fold, one that we had an understanding of what work would be created by a specific time and it wasn't, the second being that student teams get a discount on the cost per hour of work at $15 per hour, where as students who are not part of a team have to pay $25.
In terms of the cost our understanding from the people in the shop, specifically Rick Forgett, is that the cost for teams is supplemented by the dean. It seems rather unfair that some student projects are supplemented while others are not. We understand that teams tend to take their projects off campus and are tied to promoting the university, but design projects also get promoted to the general public through outreach and symposium days. If the dean isn't willing to supplement all students perhaps the department would be willing to match what student teams pay.
When it came to paying for our project there was some challenge, the shop likes having an account to put the charges through rather than on a WatCard but the department was not willing to help us with this because they cannot accept cash to deposit into the department account. This became part of the challenge when attempting to pay for the work that was done. In future it would be appreciated if there was some support from the department on tasks such as this so that we could put it through an account.
More of the challenge was that there was an agreement with the shop that all of the work we had requested would be finished by March 8th. The following are the series of events that took place:
Friday, March 1st - Met with the E3 shop to determine if they would be able to complete our project in the timeline projected. It was deemed that the project would be completed by Friday, March 8th as Fred Bakker who would be working on it would be on vacation the next week. We were further told that it would take about 20-30 hours to complete the work, and we would be responsible for the full cost. We decided to supply them with the materials to lower our costs.
Monday, March 4th - We dropped off all of the materials for the project in the morning.
Wednesday, March 6th - We went back to the E3 shop to ensure that the project was on track. It was mentioned on this day that the measurements on the wood for our project were not accurate and was therefore causing problems. We were reassured that the project would still be completed by Friday, March 8th.
Thursday, March 7th - We randomly decided to call the shop in the afternoon to determine what time we would need to pick up our project the next day. While on the phone with Rick Forgett, we were informed that there were problems with the project
While we realize that there is nothing that can be done to help our project we would appreciate it if steps were taken to help prevent activities like this in the future and to make the shop more accessible by all students, not just those on teams.
Rachel Northey
4A Systems Design Engineering
University of Waterloo