Flight Lab Reflection

This project didn't exactly change the way I think about how math can be applied to the real world since I kind of already assumed that parabolic curves were used for flight and nothing else. The surprising thing for me, with parabolas, was finding out all the other ways that they could be used. I didn't know that they were for finding maximums and minimums and that's been very cool to learn. I've worked in the bar industry most of my adult life and those people just trial-and-error everything and I thought that was how it was done, so finding out that you can actually figure this stuff on paper before applying it has been eye-opening. I actually got a chance to very clumsily try to use parabolas a few nights ago when my friend asked me if I could help her figure out a good argument against some changes that her work was trying to make to improve productivity. This was a really fun assignment. These are my favorite kinds of assignments and I'm really looking forward to doing more like them in 1050 next semester.