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Ryan McGinnis ’09 (Charlotte, Vt.), a mechanical engineering major, worked with Steven Nesbit, associate professor of mechanical engineering, on an EXCEL research project focusing on the mechanics of a golf swing.
My EXCEL project this summer started last November when I approached Dr. Steve Nesbit in the mechanical engineering department about doing research with him. We talked about possible projects and he told me about some previous studies he had done on the kinetics and kinematics of the golf swing.
We agreed that collaborating on, and extending some of this earlier research would make for an interesting project. Of course, being a golfer, I may have had ulterior motives, but only subconsciously. After working on the project as an independent study during the spring semester, I was excited to continue with the research, and to become a professional researcher (get paid through EXCEL).
I spent most of my time during the spring semester teaching myself to use the Matlab computing program to model the mechanics of the golf swing. During the summer, I spent most of my time representing the model data in various formats, and trying to make sense of it all. These are all skills that, at least through my junior year, I hadn’t had a chance to develop within the usual mechanical engineering curriculum.
Prior to this summer, my expertise was in homework, paper writing, engineering labs, and study groups. That being said, I had virtually no experience with a larger scale project, with assignments where the answers weren’t known yet, and assignments where there really weren’t answers. I had no idea what it was like to work really hard to get huge amounts of data and then spend weeks and weeks trying to find the meaning in it all.
Fortunately, Dr. Nesbit was coaching me along, and I was able to experience some success. We discovered trends in our data, which translated to insight into previously ignored aspects of the golf swing. Thanks to our work, the golf swing can now be modeled more accurately which, if nothing else, helps to increase the understanding of one of the most complex movements in sports.
Looking back, one of the most valuable things that I will take from this summer is a better understanding of what it means to do research as a mechanical engineer. I started the project without clear ideas on what research was, or what I wanted to focus on in graduate school. Now I have a senior thesis topic, and a crystal clear idea of which graduate schools are right for me.