 The purpose of the vertically integrated project's Air Force Research Laboratory unmanned aerial system class is to get young undergrad students exposed early on to a project that they can do research in throughout their career at Purdue. The purpose of this course is to give students basically hands-on experience working with other disciplines and in this case we're trying to create UAS products that actually are meaningful in the industry and for everyday use. I wanted to participate in this particular course because I've always been interested in the application of search and rescue with drones. It's what I did my senior project on in high school. So it was really cool to see that there was like a continuance at a higher level offered at Purdue and undergraduate. I wanted to participate in this VIP course because it's a really great opportunity for hands-on learning. You get many opportunities to really work with different things with different software and technology and hardware as well. And you're a part of the design process from beginning to end and not many other classes do that. I wanted to participate in VIP because I knew that I wanted to get hands-on experience and work on a project starting right away when I came to college my freshman year. The goal of the VIP class is to allow you to enter that when you have relatively low experience and it allows you to learn with your group throughout the course of the class. And then later on you'll take that class. You'll continue it when you're in upperclassmen and be able to teach those skills to underclassmen below you. This course has allowed me to expand my lifelong interest in aviation and has taught me a lot more about unmanned aerial systems, which is what we're working with. And I've gotten to see everything that can go into them, such as slam with mapping and the different videos they're able to record and how you're able to use them in a professional setting and in our case for search and rescue, which is really neat. The main super important thing I'm learning from this course is getting a like bigger background in ROS and the required computer skill sets to do what I want to do with search and rescue and drone engineering. The best thing for me in this course is getting to work with a lot of very talented people. You get to learn from them as well as from the professors and from doing hands-on work. But it's really a great team effort and you just you learn so much that you wouldn't even expect to have learned. My biggest goal for my students in this course is I want to give them a chance to learn kind of the low-level engineering and software skills that are required to actually make products in industry and especially with people working for startups where they're going to be doing a lot of this by themselves. They don't have a multi-person team. They have to do everything, you know, kind of a roboticist has to do, which is soldering, software engineering, aerospace engineering, kind of tying it all together into one package. So this a sweet team now is finishing their final design review with Air Force Research Labs. And AFR was giving them feedback on their design and making suggestions kind of at the low level about their choices of drone, their choices of battery, their choice of camera and suggesting things that they could do better so that they can take those ideas, incorporate them into the design and improve the product for the final presentation at the annual meeting. There's a lot of skills that you acquire from being team lead and I think a really big one is learning how to communicate with a lot of groups of people. So with your superiors and with different advisors as well as everyone else who's on the team and it's a really good position to help everyone feel included as well. You also get really good at organizing things and making sure that everything gets done and it's a really good way to expand your own skills as well. I enjoy helping students achieve a level of understanding they didn't have before entering this course. I would recommend this course to other students because out of all the projects I've worked in since starting undergrad, this has been the one that's allowed me to explore my interests the most. I would definitely recommend a VIP course to other students. There are so many teams so there's definitely one for anyone with any interests. There are so many and it's just great to get the hands-on project experience as well as make connections with the industry, get to know professors and collaborate with your fellow peers who you might not know otherwise. I would definitely recommend this VIP course to other students. You get so many unique opportunities. You get to work hands-on with things. You get to do research. You get to totally design where you want, decide where you want your project to go and there's no other class like it.