Isaiah grew up in Trinidad and Tobago, with stops in Azerbaijan and Houston, Texas. He had an engineer’s mindset from an early age. “Every toy I got for Christmas, I would take it apart to see how it worked,” he says. “Eventually my parents stopped buying me toys!”

When it came time to choose a university, Isaiah did what every good 21st century researcher does: he Googled it. “I saw that Purdue was a top 10 engineering school,” he remembers. “But what really stood out for me was the Bechtel Innovation Design Center. With that amazing facility, I can have an idea, and make whatever I want.”

Coming to a university with 50,000 students in another country, Isaiah had several layers of culture shock to overcome. “First-Year Engineering was definitely a challenge,” he says. “We had to learn to work in teams right from the start. If you really want to be an engineer, this is what it’s going to look like. At the same time, it was challenging to find the right clubs and activities I wanted to get involved in.”

He was stretched so thin so early, his GPA suffered; he didn’t initially qualify for Mechanical Engineering. But he persevered, and after re-taking some early classes, his second attempt was successful. Of course, then he had to face Thermodynamics, Heat & Mass Transfer, and Controls. “I’ll admit the math was challenging,” he says. “But I actually loved Controls. We weren’t just practicing equations, but we were combining electronics, machinery, and math to make things move.”

As if piling on those challenges wasn’t enough, Isaiah had to deal with the hard choices of being an international student during the COVID lockdown. He spent a semester-and-a-half back in Trinidad, attending classes remotely – making it difficult to forge personal connections. “Reintegrating back into Purdue in-person was definitely a welcoming experience,” he says.

COVID made every aspect of college life more challenging, but Isaiah Baptiste (second from right) still joined the Kappa Sigma fraternity, as well as many other Purdue clubs, organizations, and activities.

Let’s just do it!

Isaiah also realized that college is not just about the classes you take. Integrating clubs and activities is just as vital – not only for personal fulfillment, but also for networking and exploring future job prospects. Isaiah decided to try the shotgun approach. “I joined about 9 different clubs during my time here,” he says. “My experience was, let me just get a taste of what’s here, what I can learn, and what I can contribute.”

He played rugby. He helped out with GEARE. He joined a fraternity, Kappa Sigma. He worked on the Purdue Lunabotics team. He had an internship at Cummins. He participated in a VIP project, helping to design an autonomous robot to disinfect classrooms. He was a part of Purdue’s chapter of National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE).

Finally, he joined PurdueTHINK, a student-run consulting organization that helps develop professional skills. This group of entrepreneurial students convinced Isaiah that his quest to find the right clubs and activities actually presented an opportunity.

“The core issue isn’t just finding what clubs and organizations are out there,” he says. “It really comes down to: which clubs, activities, and organizations should I engage with, in order to help me meet my goals? Rather than just presenting students with a long list, can we make a platform to help students answer those questions?”

Isaiah’s friend Morgan Fuller suggested he should pitch this idea at an upcoming business competition at SXSW in Austin, Texas. “I didn’t have a business model, I didn’t have a prototype or anything. He said, ‘That doesn’t matter; let’s just do it full force!’ So in two weeks, I put together this really scrappy pitch deck, and ended up loving it.”

In March 2022, Isaiah and Morgan received support to travel to Austin from the School of Mechanical Engineering, John Martinson Entrepreneurial Center, College of Engineering, and Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship. Both had a chance to pitch their respective apps to a room full of investors and entrepreneurs.

“That was the biggest learning experience for me,” he says. “They are asking important questions like, ‘What is the problem you are solving?’ ‘What is the value that your product brings to customers?’ ‘How do you know this is going to work?’ That’s really where Umerge was born.”

Umerge is an online platform where students anonymously input their interests, their passions, their goals, and what they are specifically looking to gain out of their college experience. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, Umerge delivers a path of real-world activities, events, and organizations on-campus that offer students the best tools, skills, and resources to accomplish their goals. It also benefits the University, offering them a closer insight into what students are really looking for in their college experience.

Isaiah is now recruiting a team to fully develop Umerge, including co-founder Sola Akerele and software engineer Drew Wiegel. “We see the technical obstacles in our way, and we’re now working to developing a minimum viable product, and guaranteeing that it works 100% of the time,” he says. “I’m really excited about the next steps, and seeing the results.”

As a business minor, Isaiah sees business and engineering as perfect partners that belong together. “Engineering without business is just products,” he says. “Business without engineering is just value. If you put them together, and have a product that provides value, you win!”

Sola Akerele and Isaiah Baptiste, co-founders of Umerge, with Purdue president Mitch Daniels. Umerge hopes to solve an issue Isaiah faced in his own college experience: determining which clubs, activities, and organizations would best serve his goals.

Putting it all together

As a senior, Isaiah is fully engaged in his senior design capstone project, a shockwave simulator for Zucrow Labs. “I absolutely love Senior Design,” he says. “It’s the one time when you get to put together all the knowledge you’ve learned in all your classes up to this point, and really get creative with it and bring something to fruition. That project you’ve been wanting to tackle? Here’s your chance to put together a team and go for it. It’s a chance to both go deep and go broad.”

As he looks back on his Purdue experience, Isaiah has some advice for young people considering engineering: “If you’re in high school and you don’t know exactly what you want to do, that is absolutely OK. But you should have a baseline of where your passions are, and what you enjoy doing. When you get to college, try new things and meet new people, and try to learn something from every experience. For me, engineering was an amazing field to do this. I see engineering in everything, from the chairs we sit in to the cars we drive – and I want to be a part of that.”

He continues: “There are three main things I’ve learned at Purdue. First, you need to find the right people to be around you. Second, never be afraid to ask questions. As engineers, we’re tempted to try to solve problems on our own; but by asking questions, we can get to solutions a lot more quickly, which is a very useful skill in the real world. And finally: just do it. Purdue has that culture embedded in me, that if you have an idea or a passion, you can do it. Even if it doesn’t work, you can learn from it to do the next thing!”

According to Isaiah, engineering and business are meant to work together: "If you have a product that provides value, you win!"

Writer: Jared Pike, jaredpike@purdue.edu, 765-496-0374

Source: Isaiah Baptiste, isaiahbaptiste.com