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lauren quotes

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 quotes

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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lauren quotes

Lauren’s Quotes #21

[14-19] Then after spring break, that’s when everything went down. My classes, they all got canceled and moved online because of the pandemic. My apartment got hit by a tree recently, so now I’m staying with my boyfriend’s family right now. And then my family has been exposed to the virus, and that’s kind of sucky, because my father’s immunocompromised.

[300-301] I mean, it’s also kind of sucky not being able to go and see my friends on campus anymore, because of everything happening.

[362-364] So, this semester, I’ve only really interacted with my teachers. I had a meeting with my advisor. You have to do one once a year. Teachers and my advisor are all I’ve really interacted with this semester.

[370-377; 383-385; 395-397] As far as my peers, I definitely had been interacting with other students a lot more. Three of us were in a little group together. So, I had the most knowledge about magnetism out of the three of us, but when the teacher started talking about chemistry terms or something, all three of us were sitting there like, “What’s chemistry?” However, since we transitioned online, I haven’t really worked with my peers online all that much. Or at all.

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quotes tchuck

Tchuck’s Family & Childhood

[91-94; 96-98] My dad is an engineer, so I was from that young age I had that influence over me, I still do. So that was a big part. So I’m the oldest of four, so I have three other siblings. So I felt like there’s always that pressure to succeed, do well in school and all that stuff. […] I like knowing how things work and all that generic stuff. So yeah I’d say it’s a mix between. I do want to do it and I do like it, but I think also a big part of it was also my dad.

[9-11; 28-30; 38-44] …in terms of my academics at least, I always try very hard. I’ve always taken the hardest classes. I was in STEM Academy for my high school… it was everyone that was looking for majors involving science, technology, engineering and math and all that types of stuff, basically you get put in a cohort, to an extent. There was specific trips we were able to go on since we were in the STEM academy. The biggest thing, […] was an agreement they had with […] a local community college, and I got to transfer out, 16 college credits. I just picked whatever class I had, and if I got an A or B in them for the transfer credit I was able to do that, so I got to bring in those into [East coast university].

[58-62; 66-68; 70-72] they just introduced it in my senior year, an engineering class. So obviously I took it, because I was like, “You know, why not? Maybe it will be relevant, maybe it will be interesting.” So I took it, it was all right. It was mostly based on mechanical engineering which like, I’m biomedical engineering, so it’s still useful, I suppose, but I am not as interested in it. It was a good class. We watched […an] open-heart surgery, we got to watch that. So that was kind of interesting to watch. […]. I remember watching it and I found it pretty interesting, cause like I don’t know, I think that stuff is interesting, I don’t care about the blood or anything like that.

[76-78] So, the only thing I didn’t like about [the STEM Academy was], I don’t get to into it, but today nowadays they stress the women in engineering thing, I don’t have a problem with that, except then they have the trips only for women in engineering so I couldn’t even go.

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anna quotes

Anna’s Family & Childhood

[16-22; 23-26] From kindergarten until middle school I went an alternative school which had 40 kids in it total,  grouped by rough age groups and the school was project-based learning so instead of sitting down teaching us ABCs, numbers, counting, they gave us a project, assembled us into rough groups of kids of different ages and told us to go. It was very loose, not formal at all. I didn’t learn much academic knowledge from that time, but I did learn really well how to work with other people, how to be a part of a team, how to sort of self-direct and do what I wanted to do. I spent a lot of time reading. I spent a lot of time playing with LEGOs. I got really good making friendship bracelets. I had a lot of fun and then in 5th grade, my parents started getting worried about me academically being able to make it in the real world, so they sent me to a private middle school which was very academically focused.

[27-32] Before I transitioned to middle school, I learned six years of math in two weeks. This school required uniforms, homework, quizzes, tests up the wazoo. If I got a grade less than a 95 my parents would sit down with me and have a talk, “What are you doing? What’s wrong? How can we fix this?” So, I went from having no academic structure to an academic institution that was very structured. This exposure to a highly structured academic program, prepared me to go to a ‘public’ vocational high school but I had to apply to get in.

[49-56; 57-67; 78-80] I attended a high school that had a structured curriculum centered on science and technology. It is one of the top 15 high schools in the northeast. There weren’t a lot of options for electives or classes. All of the science classes that we took were marine science classes, including one technology class each year.  For example, my freshman year I took technical writing and my sophomore year I took AutoCAD. Also, during my senior year I took a research class in which I participated in a year-long research study that hasn’t actually been done before and will be published shortly about Microplastics on the ‘east’ coast and that was an amazing class. My teacher treated me like an adult, a scientist, I was responsible for my own deadlines and due dates, and her attitude towards the class and towards my responsibilities in that class really made me want to work hard for it. I really latched on to some of the better teachers which did lead me towards engineering because they staffed really good teachers for my systems engineering class, that was so much fun. In that class we did a bunch of hands-on engineering projects, we built a Balsa bridge. We made a Rube Goldberg machine which didn’t work but it was a lot of fun to do. We made that fishing lure, I still have the website which I documented my results on and a bunch of other smaller projects and concepts about system balances and, I don’t know, engineering design. The curriculum of my high school also tried to incorporate these kinds of projects into other classes. In my physics class, we made a physical model of a ‘northeast barrier’, it has sort of a trench in it and we used sound to map it.

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john quotes

John’s Family & Childhood

[20-25] I’m a [South Asian] American … My parents were both born and raised in the [South Asian Country], and came over here. They met over here and they had me, which means that I have an Asian American background. However, unlike the stereotype, I wasn’t raised with the intention of going into a doctor or an engineer field. My parents were quite different than that, they just wanted the best for me.

[27-33] I never thought I’d be an engineering student. I thought I would be something with visual or performing arts. My path before that, I was performing like every year, every semester, and I found enjoyment from that. I’ve been a high honors student since high honor was a thing in my school…. I’ve always been good in classes, and it never really clicked that being good in math and science could be my career… until I made the decision to come here.

[47-51; 53-55; 60-66] When I was younger I was a tinkerer, I liked to take things parts and found out how things worked; it didn’t always turn out well, but I stilled liked it. For that transition [from visual performing arts to engineering], I have always been a well-rounded person, so it didn’t feel like a transition, it just felt natural for me to do something else, because I’d been doing everything before. It’s still a very fun hobby of mine, […] playing instruments, but for the visual side last semester I took a jewelry course. It was the very first place that I learned how to computer model. The very first project was like a broach, where you had to make a 2D sketch of whatever you wanted to carve out on metal. You carved it, but you also had to create a backing to support magnets that would allow you to wear the broach on your shirt, and that part was 3D printed, so not only did I learn how to model, I learned how to draft, and I learned some hands on stuff all in that jewelry class, and it was genuinely the best class I’ve ever taken.

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