These intermediate Mechanical tutorials are meant to accompany you during your onboarding project. They are not meant to hold your hand during the onboarding process. Instead they are meant to show how Solidworks has a multitude of tools that can be used in many different ways to solve the same problem. Hopefully, by the end you are not only more comfortable in Solidworks, but also a more confident engineer.
### Tips from a Former SW Newbie
Solidworks is not a text book it is a tool box
### Personal Tips from a Former SW Newbie
***Solidworks is not a text book:** Solidworks, Robotics at Maryland, and Engineering as a whole favors doers rather than book worms. Project based work can be extremely punishing to traditional students who are used to understanding a topic through books and lectures before practicing it. DO NOT STUDY SOLID WORKS USE SOLID WORKS. Every 1 min you spend in the modeling software is worth 1 hour of tutorial videos.
***Solidworks is a toolbox**
***Solidworks is a toolbox:** When I was learning Solidworks it can seem overwhelming due to the number of tools available. But I quickly learned that Solidworks is like a tool box where 95% of the tools are just specialized versions of each other.
* What do I mean by this? Well you could technically whittle a wood spoon with a knife but it could take hours... or you could pull a fearless idea and just CNC it. Both methods will produce a spoon that will function as a spoon however they each have pros and cons, but that's not the point. The point is that even though whittling is slower it will still get the job done. If you only know how to use the extrude function you can still make complex designs if you're determined. The more complex CAD techniques like Top-Down Assemblies only make CAD a more streamlined process.
