EPICS nurtured Purdue alumna's enthusiasm for engineering
Emily Wigley loves all things whimsical.
So it made sense that the Goshen, Indiana, native started her college career in a Chicago film school. The most magical and impactful career for her was going to make sound even more immersive and spectacular for moviegoers.
But two weeks into the first semester in film school, Wigley was coming undone. It was not the innovative, exciting and immersive challenge she had hoped.
It wasn’t until she talked about leaving film school with the director that an engineering career became clear.
“Engineering wasn’t really ever explained to me,” said Wigley said, who donned a glow-in-the-dark and light-up anglerfish hat during a recent interview. “When I talked to the director (of the film program), he asked me what I liked to do in high school. I told him I took calculus, double the required number of science classes, and was in rocket club. He said, ‘Anyone can learn to run the equipment we have here. What we always need in film are people who can fix that equipment or make it better. You can do that, you should be an engineer.’ And it made so much sense.”
Engineering should have been obvious, Wigley admitted: Her grandfather was a Purdue alum in chemistry.
Plus, Wigley’s love for film wasn’t actually about making movies. It was about hearing them. She grew up with two brothers who had mechanical hearing loss and spent time around audiologists and speech pathologists. The machines they used to help her brothers fascinated her. The mosaic of bones and tubes and hair cells that made up hearing piqued her interest, and she was determined to make a career out of it.
Engineering turned out to be what she was looking for. She knew it from the first time she thought about being an audio engineer. Not to mention that she was local to one of the best engineering schools in the country.
So she packed up her bright, colorful dorm room in Chicago and attended Purdue in fall 2005.
Now in an environment where she felt challenged, Wigley itched to do something. Besides taking notes and making flash cards, her hands were idle.
Enter EPICS and its partnership with the Purdue audiology and speech pathology clinic (SLAC, which became the Indiana School for the Deaf EPICS team in 2017).
“EPICS became my extracurricular activity,” said Wigley, who earned a bachelor’s in multidisciplinary engineering in 2009. “It showed me tangibly that you can choose your own destiny and see the fruits of your labor in a practical way. (EPICS) gave me experience to work within totally different disciplines.”
For Wigley, EPICS was perfect. At least once a week during the second semester of Wigley’s first year, she made her way to the levee — now Wabash Landing — for class. She became team lead of the SLAC team as a sophomore, after the project’s original leads graduated. The team was full of senior students with two exceptions — Wigley and a junior — and she was delighted to be immersed in hands-on projects with model students. But, at least at the beginning, Wigley battled imposter syndrome, being both deeply inspired and intimidated by peers.
“Building that confidence of working in that kind of environment and just being able to hit the ground running was important.”
She gained confidence over the next two and a half years, using a bubbly and excitable personality to gain and keep the attention of recruiters during design reviews. The SLAC project was an interactive model of the human ear drum, made using a shaker table. The table would shake the ear drum model to visualize the vibration patterns on the ear drum. It was used to help clinic patients understand how the ear works.
Motorola recruiters who came from Chicago to West Lafayette, Indiana, for design reviews resonated with Wigley’s energy and passion.
She was offered an internship with Motorola in May 2008. It evolved into a full-time role as a haptics media manager — a senior position — in June 2009. She dove into optimizing haptics in digital devices right as mobile phones begun to take off, working with teams in Korea and China with Flash and Java. Wigley called it “the luck of the draw in pursuing my interests” and pioneered early tips and tricks for microphones and audio collection.
But that wasn’t enough for Wigley’s boundless energy. She joined Engineers Without Borders — which was an indirect connection to Purdue’s own EWB chapter — and was elected president of the organization’s Chicago professional chapter in 2009. She returned to Purdue as an EPICS design reviewer every semester for the next decade. From 2013-16, Wigley served as a co-advisor with Carla Zoltowski for the Camp Riley team. Wigley continued in that role, even while attending online graduate school at Penn State and working full-time roles with the Knowles Corporation from 2011-2018 and Shure Incorporated from 2018-19.
In December 2019, Wigley moved from Chicago to San Francisco to work as an acoustic hardware integration engineer for Apple Inc. When asked to describe her role at Apple, Wigley said simply: “I do cool things with microphones.”
She never regretted starting in film school, though. While a future in movies may not have been the primary career path, the journey taught Wigley a lot — and ultimately steered her toward a fulfilling and exciting engineering career.
“It’s not a bad thing to just try something out and find out it doesn’t work for you,” Wigley said. “It’s the same (principle) in EPICS. But you're always welcome back. There's always more teams. There's always more things to do.”