2.4 KiB
Prompt
Leadership: Honors values leadership that appreciates and engages unique perspectives and promotes collaboration. Reflect on a project, event, or activity (from this semester, Spring 2025) when you assumed or contributed to this type of leadership role.
Response
This year I was the Avionics Team Captain of Rowan Rocketry. Our team builds 10 foot tall high-power rockets and launches them in the International Rocket Engineering Competition (IREC) each year. Specifically, our goal is to launch our rocket as close to a peak altitude of 10,000 feet as possible. As Avionics Team Captain, it is my responsibility to mange the development of our student-designed flight computers. These computers take measurements from within the rocket to determine when to deploy the parachutes and payload.
While I have taken on many leadership roles in the past, I have learned that there is always something to learn in any new position. In this position, I learned that not all tasks are easy to delegate. The avionics team, including myself, has seven members. For about half of them, it was easy to delegate a project simply based on skill set and interest.
Building electronics for a rocket is obviously not trivial. There are a lot of details to consider, and it is critical to document every decision. For this reason, I often found myself giving out documentation roles when I could not come up with anything more technical. I'm still not completely sure how to communicate these concepts, especially when I had to do a lot of the design work myself.
Unfortunately, it is really difficult to do design and management work at the same time. I did a lot of preliminary design work over the summer, so I came into the position with a vision for how I wanted to design the system. Once the Fall semester started, we made several significant changes to the system, but my overall vision did not change much. I found that communicating this vision was rather difficult, especially if I wanted encourage everyone to make their own design decisions.
Since we made significant alterations to the design, a lot of that work had to be scrapped. If I were to start over, I would have spent that time planning and doing more abstract system-level design rather than in-depth electronics design. Next time I find myself in such a position, even if the project is just a personal one, I want to not just have a vision, but an in-depth plan of every requirement and feature.