As I conclude my education, I begin to consider different influential aspects that have matured my thinking; between friends, classes, and the array of organizations and groups, its nearly impossible to discover which aspect has provided the largest guidance.  Throughout the course of my college career, I have been extremely fortunate to have numerous opportunities to expand in almost any direction I desire.  Within these resources specific to Michigan Tech, I found great interest in working within the Innovative Castings Enterprise.  One of the most expansive attributes of this organization exists within the vast amount of resources: being a mechanical engineer outnumbered by many elite materials science students, I now find myself expanding design principles to new levels.  Before entering this enterprise, this fact seemed extremely intimidating; having little knowledge of metal cast design, it became difficult to justify entrance.  Needless to say, since my inclusion into the organization, I have found nothing but positive enhancements to my education.  Specific to the metal cast industry, I have been able to take information in which my standard mechanical training hardly touched – be it through basic casting principles to specific, project objectives, the couple of years spent in the enterprise has been extremely enlightening.  From a technical aspect, I began with a very in-dept introduction to basic casting fundamentals.  Having a foundry on campus, this insightful development process was an awesome experience.  From this, professionally sponsored projects were distributed to all students.  My first year consisted of a failure analysis provided by very large foundry located in upper Wisconsin.  Not only did this provide excellent professional skills with respect to environmental adaptation through the plant trips, this project also helped develop excellent skills with professional castings engineers.  An intriguing part of the project consisted in the inconsistencies of a solution – this greatly helped me explore almost all aspects of the castings project.  My second year with the enterprise has also allowed for hands-on experiences through multiple plant and design trips, but has also taken my casting design to a much higher magnitude.  This project involved an initial part design, but also demanded a complete castings process design – transitioning the current operation into a much more efficient DISA system.  Not only will this increase the post-process costs, but also greatly increase the efficiency at which the parts are made.  In terms of specific casting experience, this provides an extremely in depth design process for gating configurations, net shape modeling, prototyping molds, and post-simulation reporting – a new experience for our enterprise; using a casting simulation, we are now able to fully understand almost every aspect of a project, be it through porosity issues, local hot-spots, or gating contentions, before time is invested into physical components.  This entire design process has been extremely beneficial to my entire engineering adeptness.  Overall, the experience, education, and design practices, especially related through our castings enterprise, have allowed me to mature into a valuable student, and, more importantly, evolved engineer.