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Joy’s Quotes #31

[433-442] Thermodynamics is probably going not as smoothly as the other ones. He already had a hard time teaching. This is his second year or third year. I’m in the middle of a take home exam at the moment and it’s seven pages long, and I’m going on 10 hours of work. I’m not done yet. His teaching style is not conducive with most people’s learning styles. This is my third class with him, so you just get used to it, and you understand what he means and he’s very kind. He’s trying. But it’s like, for example, thankfully we’re not in the classroom setting anymore, so we’re just doing lectures online. But that means that he goes through his PowerPoint and he just reads it, word for word, and it’s an engineering PowerPoint, so there’s not very many words.

[443-454] So, he’s just reading equations, like Delta X over Delta Y equals Lambda, over Lambda this, and just reads it. No pauses, nothing. He gets on the call, he says hello and then just starts reading, and there’s no inflection of the voice, it’s just straight reading for 30 minutes, because that’s how long it takes him to read the lecture. As opposed to […] Say, in the lecture we’re taking the full hour, because there’s back and forth. And even though it’s a Zoom call, nobody talks because that’s just not the way he runs his class. So, it’s a little weird. You just teach yourself and then you ask him questions via email if you need help. I guess he technically wrote the slides, maybe. I don’t know if he got them from the textbook, I don’t know if the textbook also publishes slides to go with it or not. So, he still meets with the criteria of interacting with students, but that class is a stretch. But so far so good. I don’t have an F or anything close to it.

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Joy’s Quotes #32

[46-51] Despite the difficulties associated with transitioning online, I like that this is stretching me in new ways because I am a very hands on person and I don’t have a lot of experience in that area, and I don’t have as much experience using online modeling tools. Not just online, but electronic modeling tools like CAD and LTspice for circuits and that kind of stuff. I think it’s a good stretch. It will benefit me sometime later in life. Not sure when, but hopefully it will. And I think that’s caught up until now.

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Joy’s Quotes #33

[520-536] In addition to managing coursework, I’ve been applying to internships. Now that I’ve been home for awhile, it’s given me time to apply. My dad is a computer science major and has helped me with resumes, and has lots of connections. So, we applied to a place […] We applied to a place last night and he had connections there. So, hopefully that one will work out, and I just need to find an apartment in a nice neighborhood and hope that this whole coronavirus thing will allow me to have a job in two months. Because if I don’t get my practicum this summer, technically you’re not allowed to graduate, because my engineering program requires that you have one internship. Your academic advisor has to meet with your employer and ask them questions about how capable a student is and their verbal communication skills, communication skills, work ethic, ability to problem solve, that kind of stuff. So, I need that before I graduate. I graduate next year, which means this is my last summer. But on the other hand, I understand that there are so many people in the same situation that the university may just have to adjust something. And it may be that my job that I get, after I graduate, they will count that as a practicum for the first two months.

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Joy’s Quotes #34

[637-641] Overall, I think the last few months have been a positive. It’s been a boost into the right direction that I’m starting to feel more like an engineer, specifically with the problem-solving skills. I feel confident that I can solve problems with enough time. So, I think this year has been a great learning experience and that it’s going to help me get a job this summer and a job after I graduate as well.

[643-652] After I graduate, I hope to work in manufacturing. Another option that I’ve been holding onto in the back of my mind is getting my master’s in prosthetics and orthotics. But, at the current moment, I have not pursued anything to do with biomedical careers, or master’s programs. So, I am currently looking to work in industry, and I’ve always enjoyed manufacturing. So, the summer I applied to a car transmission vehicle transmission, manufacturing company. So, I want to be a quality engineer. Of all the places that I’ve job shadowed, I liked that role the best out of the places that I’ve looked at. And the internship I applied for as a quality systems engineer, an intern.

[655-672] I’m interested in working as a quality engineer because I personally do better when I’m improving things as opposed to inventing things from square one. And I enjoy patterns and numbers and I enjoy things that are symmetric and make sense like that, and fixing things that don’t quite look right. So quality is a huge part of who I am as a person. I job shadowed a biomedical company a couple years ago, and they gave me a different person to shadow, it was really nice, every hour of the day, and I was there for eight hours. So I got a wide view of their company and I was interested. So the quality engineer, I sat in on one of her meetings, and I liked how they went through the document and were able to view the data, and see how it was calculating the percentage of error and then going on to the actual plant floor and looking at the machines that are not doing so well, or looking at test pieces that came out that are like defective and measuring them with calipers or micrometer. Afterwards I realized that I enjoyed that part of my day.

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lauren participants

Meet Lauren

Lauren is a white woman attending a southern university and majoring in mechanical engineering. She took four years of engineering as a high school student, where she studied 3D modeling and mechanics. As part of these classes, she completed a senior thesis and designed a cleaning device for the hand rims of wheelchairs:

We chose to design a cleaning device for wheelchairs because one of my best friends in ‘southern region’ is wheelchair-bound. So, I’d been out at dinner with him and he went to go wash his hands before food. When he came out of the restroom, his hands were dirty again [because] there had been something on the floor that got onto him, so I mentioned it to my ‘team partner’ when we were brainstorming ideas for our project and we were like, “Wow, let’s see if we can do something to help that.”

From Lauren’s first interview

During Lauren’s second year, one of her professors reached out to her about working as a researcher in his lab. As part of her work as a research assistant, Lauren has studied magnetic nanoparticles and has been an author on multiple papers and is tentatively planning to attend graduate school. The image below is a journey map that Lauren created summarizing some of the highs and lows from her third year as an engineering student.

Lauren’s second-semester, third-year journey map.

Want to learn more about Lauren’s journey? Check out her tag here (or by clicking the ‘Lauren’ tag below) to see quotes from her interviews over the years.

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Lauren’s Childhood & Family

[6-7; 23-24; 31-37; 69-75] I’ve grown up in ‘southern region’ for the grand majority of my life. I lived six weeks in ‘rocky mountain region’, but then my family moved to ‘southern region.’ My high school is right next to the local ‘southern region college’. Yeah, I had to test to get into my high school. They took our state testing results. You had to have a certain grade to get into the school, but the school was a public school. You just had to maintain a couple of other things, like you had to get a hundred service hours throughout high school, take multiple AP classes. When we did classwork and stuff, it was kind of silly, but we had to write “always my best” on the top. Everyone kind of laughed at that. They did push you to try and do really good.

[46-48; 56-58] Throughout my four years of high school, I took human geography, psychology, environmental sciences , US history, German, bio, government and macroeconomics. I also took four years of my high school’s engineering classes such as 3D modeling and mechanics. My first engineering class involved drawing a lot of diagrams, which I didn’t enjoy, but the second year we did a lot of CAD work, Computer Aided Design, and I really loved working with that. During the third year of high school, we talked about springs and motiwon and linear motion and stuff like that and we built some things. My friend and I tried to build a grabber arm for an arcade machine out of cardboard and duct tape and pneumatics. It didn’t work the best, but we were the cheapest budget.

[75; 91-92; 95-99] Then, during senior year, it was all about my senior thesis. We chose to design a cleaning device for wheelchairs because one of my best friends in ‘southern region’ is wheelchair-bound. So, I’d been out at dinner with him and he went to go wash his hands before food. When he came out of the restroom, his hands were dirty again. There had been something on the floor that got onto him, so I mentioned it to my ‘team partner’ when we were brainstorming ideas for our project and we were like, “Wow, let’s see if we can do something to help that.”. As a result, we designed the device to clean the hand rims as you rolled the wheelchair around.

[77-84; 64-67] My ‘Team partner’ and I spent a lot of time on the design project. We had three hours in class every week to work on the project and outside of class, me and her would meet up for around seven hours on the weekend to work on it and sometimes we met after class too. We used the ‘southern region college’ to 3D print parts for us. We would sand the parts down and make them cleaner and then assemble them together. We had to write a paper to go with the project and we wrote more than anyone else in the class had written, which we didn’t need to do, but we felt everything was important. We stood in the gym for a while and professional engineers and other professionals came through and listened to our spiel about the product. We had a prototype and we had a really cool bulletin board. I’m still really proud of that project. I really enjoyed the senior, engineering project, so I decided I would try and go into that for my life.

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Lauren on Choosing Engineering

[14-15; 109-113] Leaving the house to go to ‘southern region university’ was pretty hard to leave my nine-year-old little sister behind because she’s so young and didn’t really understand what was happening. I picked to go to ‘southern region university’ because it was the best engineering school in ‘southern region’. I originally wanted to go to a ‘large midwestern university’, but the out-of-state tuition was too much for me and my family to afford, so I came here instead. It really is an awesome school. The local ‘southern region college’ would have been cheaper, but they didn’t have an engineering degree, so I didn’t really want to go with them. It made more sense to go to this ‘southern region university’.

[115-118; 127-130] I chose to study mechanical engineering. Based off my senior thesis, I would have gone with biomedical because wheelchairs are a medical thing, but I figured mechanical would be more general than anything else. I would get a little bit of everything, so at the end of the day, I can do whatever I want. A little bit of everything includes taking classes outside of mechanical engineering like material science classes, chemistry classes, electrical engineering classes, and programming classes. I’m not just going to know how to solve free-body diagrams.

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Lauren’s Quotes #1

[137-142; 152-157] My first semester, I didn’t have many engineering classes. It was mostly like math and general education courses, but I did have to take a class called ‘Engineering 101’ and they taught us free-body diagrams and force equals mass times acceleration. It was more physics than engineering, but we had recitation classes every week where we would apply the physics to real-world stuff, at least try to. Sometimes the projects were a little sad. When we were learning about momentum, we would stack two golf balls on top of each other and drop them on the ground. At the end of the first semester, we had a project where we designed a puck launcher where we had to launch the puck across the table. You scored points based on where the puck landed on the table.

[143-149; 158-161; 165-170; 172-173] During the second semester, I took ‘Engineering 102’ where we did more stuff with circuits and harmonic motions. We were given a problem and we had to design a solution to that problem. For that one, my group got the assignment of a STEM toy. Make it so that kids enjoy learning STEM. My group made a basketball launcher game, like a tabletop basketball. You had to figure out what angle you’re throwing the ball at and what force. We chose to design a basketball launcher since it seemed to be the easiest thing that we could come up with based on the time we could all work on the project together. There were four of us to the group, but we didn’t really know each other beforehand, so we weren’t good friends and they just randomly assigned us. Our schedules didn’t match up all that well, so we only had class time to work on the project. I didn’t have as much fun as my senior thesis, but we got it done and we made a marketing video for it. We presented it to the class, and we got a good grade I also had my first mechanical engineering class in the second semester. I took a statics course that focused on free body diagrams. I still talk with some of the professors when I see them in the hall. In some instances, I would ask them how they were doing. Even though the ‘Engineering 102’ class was huge, 600 people, the professors still recognized me, and it was really cool.

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Lauren’s Quotes #2

[196; 200-204] I really enjoyed the projects second year of college. My programming class involved two projects. One of them was programming a Roomba to work on Mars. I trained it to walk behind me and it could play tag. My partner and I really enjoyed working on that project. The other one was working with microcontrollers, specifically Arduino. For both projects, I was partnered with someone I had never met before. We had a lot of time to work on the project and we got dinner once together because it was dinner time while we were working on the project. We clicked and we were good friends.

[227-229; 233-239] During my third semester, one of the professors reached out to me and was like, “Hey, you were a really cool student” and asked if I would want to come work in his lab. He works with magnetic nanoparticles. I am responsible for developing simulations so that we can see if we can figure out what skyrmions look like on the inside. They are like magnetic materials that are circles and they’ve got weird shape on the inside.

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Lauren’s Quotes #3

[9-18; 20-23] The start of the semester is always sort of sucky, you have to go to college, and you can’t really stay home with your family anymore. That was a little sucky, but new classes are always cool. I wasn’t super sad, that and I got to see a bunch of my friends again, so it wasn’t a horrible time. As you adjust to school, life gets easier and everything is good, because it’s easy. I collect cards, and so I was really happy when I got some new cards. I celebrated one year anniversary with my boyfriend this semester at a fancy restaurant. Yeah, that was really fun, because we don’t go out a lot, because of money.

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