iFoundry as a whole

Now, when I look at iFoundry, I am reminded of the little "festivals" that parents try to put on. They have a palpable feel to them. Its a feeling of sadness, of insignificance, or of "I had good intentions and tried really hard but failed" kinda thing. This feeling makes me sick. Physically ill, because I can sense it from far away. As soon as I see the project in action, there's just this, feeling of dread. Because when examined on paper, the project elicited smiles from all involved, but fails to meet anyone's expectations in the real world.

iFoundry feels like one of these projects. "Let's let kids work with actual companies, but let's have them work on their own, so they can express their own ideas. It will provide fantastic real world experience!" Thats what this project looked like on paper. I can see that I should be really honored to be in this project, as it is really beneficial to me, as it both teaches me about and ensures me a future with a company.

The only problem was that I wasn't ready, and neither was anyone else.

We came from one of the most defined, and structured stages of our life, High School, and are thrust into an ambiguous and fluid stage, where we are expected to make something our of nothing. This is the way the actual world works, so it would seem excellent training, but falls short of what it could achieve.
The ropes course is a great example for our high school career: We are put in an environment with boundaries, given a task, and set loose. There are many answers, but few efficient ones, and we soon find the "correct" answer.
iFoundry was like putting us in the middle of town, and telling us to "do a project". No one knew the needs of the town, those who did know thought it best to not tell us, and none of us really knew each other.
These factors contributed to so much confusion and stalling for the first few weeks, but eventually, the teams constructed a structure from which to work from. Then as we explored the needs of the structure, its strengths and weaknesses, we got to the end of the semester.

That was all we could do.

That was all I expected after the first meeting. We were a small team, in an uncommon field, nothing like "Engineering and Environment", where everyone has heard of the types of projects done. I think thats why our group is so small. No one really knew what it was about. I choose it cause it sounded closest to what I wanted to do in life (I was correct, the projects we talked about all sounded really interesting), but we didn't have the structure that was necessary for any of the projects.
In the real world, we have experienced members, previous knowledge, and the basic know how to get our jobs done. At iFoundry, we had none of that.