My first experience with drones through Purdue was with an fixed wing, called the Night Vapor. This was used in an introductory class and basically was to teach me how a fix wing would fly. We used these for a few labs, but most of them crashed and were obsolete by the second week of class. We were responsible for fixing our aircraft throughout the semester which was good experience. The next semester I was given a kit to build a quadcopter.  The quad I received was the x525 quadcopter. We didn't have very good instruction of how to properly build this drone, so for those of us who's first time it was building and programming one, it was extremely difficult. Through the first semester the only task we had was to build these drones and make them fly properly. It was a tough class but at the end of it, my x525 would at least fly to an extent. It wasn't calibrated very well but it was good enough to pass. Throughout the next semester I figured out how to calibrate this drone and started really building some flight time with quadcopters. For our next class we used the same x525 quadcopters that we built and put together, but this time we attached an autopilot. We used the pixhawk 4d for our autopilot which gave me some great experience on both that and mission planner. I think this would have been great experience if the drone we used was better for the program. Half the time if something malfunctioned we couldn't tell if it was the drone not being calibrated or the autopilot acting up. I was happy to get rid of the x525 quadcopters and upgrade to the 3DR solos. These were equipped with autopilot and GoPro Cameras. This gave us a chance to better enhance our autopilot skills and also work on some camera work with video editing. We did several missions on mapping using manual and autopilot flight. I feel like this last semester working with the 3DR Solo was the first time I received experience with a tool rather than just a toy.