Last year had a great impact on me, mainly because of one thing: ME310. Most people do not know what that is, and the most frequent question is: “ME310? What is that?”

What is ME310?

ME310 comes from Mechanical Engineering 310, a course at Stanford University. It is also the name of the postgraduate programme I took in Porto, which is part of the SUGAR Network, a global network bringing together multidisciplinary students from different universities, ready to solve real product development challenges.

I am going to share my experience of this “full-time job” that made Porto Design Factory my second home for 9 months.

ME310 Global Kick Off at Porto Design Factory

The first weeks were intense, full of exercises that led us to understand the kind of mindset we needed for the rest of the year ahead. They were definitely intense weeks, and it was where the methodology we would be working with was introduced: Design Thinking, a methodology focused on the user, on their needs and desires. We were also set small challenges which, as well as pushing us towards the intended mindset, let us do some team building and get to know the people who would be with us over the coming months, and which at the same time allowed the teaching staff to assess each member of the “class”, so as to form the teams that would work on the challenges the partner companies had set.

The teams were a kind of startup, where we were responsible for taking on the challenge, researching, prototyping, gathering results and developing a solution to meet users’ needs.

This course changed the way I look at the world and at myself. It is project-based, built on passion, multicultural, interdisciplinary, hands-on… completely the opposite of the traditional system we are used to. There is no pedestal for the teacher, no classroom with desks and chairs in rows, and the teacher is not there every day with a projector dictating the material. The environments are created by the students, there are conversations between students and teachers on the sofa, the teacher does not hold absolute knowledge and students are encouraged to question and debate the opinions exchanged.

For me it was something that made me grow faster and faster, and the biggest difference is that I can look back and see some of those differences. In those 9 months I read and wrote far more than I did during my degree, because the way we look for knowledge to feed the project comes through our own curiosity and ambition.

We challenge ourselves every day, and that happens for several reasons:

  • every day we are forced out of our comfort zone
  • we are working in a field we are not used to
  • we are not used to questioning what we are told
  • we have to do research in order to understand the customer better than anyone
Öbot Workshop at IdeaSquare, CERN

The truth, though, is that if the course were not as intense as it is, nobody would fall so in love with it. Obviously that passion is what makes us want to do more and, at the same time, it is what can leave us fixated on something, and that may not be the best option, so never “fall in love” with your work.

Failure is a word used a great deal in this methodology, and we think we already know what it means, but the truth is that we only understand it after failing a few times and getting past our frustration. It is true that there is room to fail, but it has to be with the aim of extracting useful information for the project and learning something from it.

Something that helps us into that mindset is that grades are never discussed during the course. That makes us forget grades exist and ends up making us work harder, because we do not feel the pressure of a mark and end up enjoying ourselves and giving more of ourselves. The fear of failing disappears.

Presenting our project to our corporate sponsor at Porto Design Factory
Presenting the project to our corporate sponsor at Porto Design Factory

I can say that I had the chance to work with a team in Australia, with an 11-hour difference, which meant we had to adopt methods that would never compromise the work.

So while some slept, others worked on the project. That experience let me acquire new intercultural communication skills, in person and over Skype. It was not always easy, because when you cannot read body language or read between the lines of what people say, you do not have all the usual information for good communication. It meant that sometimes we had to be designers, managers, psychologists or communication specialists, which led us to develop and improve our personal skills more than any other course I have taken.

So if you feel the education system does not fit what you want, try changing not only your attitude but also looking for other ways to learn. Seek out knowledge, show yourself to be curious, accept new experiences and never take anything for granted, always try to raise questions in order to get answers you did not even know you needed.

Love, Joana