Assignment 9-1

Laura Levesque
9-1

On February 9th, 2010 there was a seminar held on the University of Maine campus for incoming students who are interested in the new minor in robotics engineering that is going to be available in the fall of 2010. There has now, also been an increase in the amount of robotics classes being offered to more than a dozen. “Mechanical and electrical engineering has offered a robotics class and students who took it wanted more, and we see robots becoming more prevalent every day” says Chet Rock, associate dean of the College of Engineering.

The major is designed to give students the fundamental understanding of robotic operation and preliminary training in design and use of robots. Students will have access to classes in mobile walking robots, robotic vision, robotic surgery, surgical micro-robotics and robot statics, kinematics, dynamics and control.

However, this seminar did not really get interesting until after the briefing when I got to speak with some of the students and professors that attended the meeting. I came across an Arts major and we began talking about the size of the engineering department versus the size of the other departments. This student brought up her concurs with the advertising major being dropped because of lack of funding, but there was enough money to fund another engineering minor. “ I hope that one day UMaine decided to only teach engineers because it is unfair that they only concentrate on that one department when there are so many other ones available.”