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Meet Joy

Joy is a white woman attending a midwestern university. Her major combines computer, electrical, and mechanical engineering, and her ideal career will include elements of biomedical engineering. Although she was homeschooled from kindergarten to high school, she was very involved in her local robotics team and made it to the world competition, experiences she links to her later success as an engineering student. She also became interested in prosthetic design from a friend, and through multiple internships has gotten hands-on experiences in a variety of design challenges:

One of the other students there has a family friend who mentioned that their parents had gotten in a car accident and were going through the process of getting prosthetics because they had to be amputated. And I was like, “Wow, that’s crazy.” But also, like, “Can you tell me a little bit more about the prosthetics that they’re getting?” …During my job shadow, he was able to fix something on his patients’ leg and put it back on their leg and they were able to walk out…. They said that they’re looking for interns, so I’m hoping that I will be able to work there this summer.

From Joy’s first interview

The image below is a journey map that Joy created summarizing some of the highs and lows from her second year as an engineering student.

Joy’s second-semester, second-year journey map.

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

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Joy’s Childhood and Family

[3-4; 5-8; 18-24; 49-50; 58-59; 67-68] So my mom is a teacher and I was originally going to be public schooled, but at the age of four I asked my mom to teach me how to read. So, she ended up teaching me how to read and then one thing led to another and then I was homeschooled from kindergarten through high school. When I first became interested in engineering when I was younger, I would help my dad with projects around the house and enjoyed hands on learning. I was in sports from age 10 through 14 and then at 14 I joined robotics and was in that all the time. And then in high school I joined a robotics team, a FIRST Robotics Team. I learned about FIRST Robotics through one of my homeschool friend’s mom. She was heavily involved in it as a volunteer. I joined because my best friend was also on the team.

[74-80] I started out of on the woodworking team because I knew that I wanted to do hands on things but working with wood is more forgivable and safer than working with metal. And it is not as expensive either. They had me working with things like drills, hand tools, calipers, and tape measurers. After my first year, I switched over to the mechanical sub-team where I was working on CNC machinery and metal, steel, acrylics, and Polycarp net.

[97-121] When it was time to apply for colleges, I visited a ‘midwestern university’. Originally, I said, “No, this is too expensive, and their engineering program is not what I want. I want something more like another ‘midwestern university’.” Then, I visited a few other smaller schools, but I chose my current ‘midwestern university’ based on a price comparison between the two schools. I believe that the other ‘midwestern university’ would have made the best mechanical engineer or environmental engineer, but I wanted to a general engineering degree and to be close to my family. Also, the professor to student ratio is 1:20. The professors are willing to help outside of class and get to know you on a personal level. I also found that their graduates actually get jobs.

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Joy on Choosing Engineering

[25-31; 32-39] The build season for robotics is six weeks from the first week of January to the second week in February. You have six weeks to construct an industry-grade robot that will complete a challenge. For example, one year we build our robot to play soccer and another year we built the robot to shoot frisbees and climb a pyramid made from piping in the center of the field. These robots are five feet tall and one hundred and twenty pounds. The design process involved reading through the manual that NASA and FIRST distributed to each team. We had to engineer everything. We made CAD models of it, built a prototype, and programmed it.

[37-39; 43-47] During my junior year of high school, I was able to take off two months of schooling because I was homeschooled and moved it to June through August. When I was in build season, I put in a hundred hours a week, for six weeks, in robotics. And we ended up making it to the world competition that year. It paid off and I learned so much from my mentors (engineers and computer scientists) and just like my other peers and like working in the engineering process from like start to finish. It’s amazing. Going through it five times, definitely helped me now in college. But, yeah. So, I accredit my ability to engage in robotics that much to being home schooled.

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Joy’s Quotes #1

[197-202] When I came into college, I had already taken Calculus 1 and Physics 1, as well as AP Physics. But in order to try to make my first year a little bit easier, I just decided to take them again. Turns out that that was helpful because I did not do, I didn’t get like, you know, 100% in Physics, so that was kind of a big jump between high school and college and like the workload required.

[229-231;239-242; 242-250; 262; 264-265; 289-300] Reflecting back to freshman orientation they said, “Look to your right and left, and in four years the person either sitting to your left or your right will not be here.” And I was like, “Yeah-” … I mean, yes. That is true.  I’ve gotten used to this now. But, yeah, freshman engineering, probably the hardest part was having all of my friends on campus not understand why I couldn’t hang out with them all the time or do things. This ‘midwestern university’ is a very social campus, similar to all campuses.  When my friends from the wing or the floor asked, “Can you hang out?” Whenever, I had to say, “No.” They were like, “Why can’t you just push it off?” Engineering is not like other majors where they complain about giving three-minute presentations. I think it was hardest having people get angry at me for trying to do my homework.

So yeah. I guess, socially was probably the hardest part of being a a freshman. Instead, I am very close with the other engineers. The juniors and seniors reach out to the younger people, as well, and are usually studying in the same places that we are. We study in a lab room all of the time including working on our design projects. For example, we had to design a laser gun that shot a specific frequency, but then we had to design a boost forward and receiver to responded to that specific frequency, as opposed to any other person’s gun or a solid beam of light. Then we competed with other teams.  Another project involved designing a plant watering system. We had to implement like four loops in C++. It was supposed to be 10 lines of code and ended up being a lot more than that. Letting freshmen pick their own projects is not a good idea. They over shoot and it makes life very difficult.

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Joy’s Quotes #3

[139; 163-169; 173-184; 186-192] During my third semester, I participated in a job shadow related to my dream job. I found out about the opportunity through someone in my robotics team. One of the other students there has a family friend who mentioned that their parents had gotten in a car accident and were going through the process of getting prosthetics because there had to be amputated. And I was like, “Wow, that’s crazy.” But also, of like, “Can you tell me a little bit more about the prosthetics that they’re getting?” And so, the lady is very engaged in helping people, like college students than high school students pursue their goals, and so she immediately plugged me into the prosthetists and the head engineer at the company, at ‘national orthotic and prosthetic company’. And she contacted him and gave me his email address and all of that. And we set up a meeting time.

During my job shadow, he was able to fix something on his patients’ leg and put it back on their leg and they were able to walk out. And he ended up saying that I could come back as many times as I wanted. It was a positive experience. I’m also interested in working with robotics and prosthetics within production lines. I can’t intern with the company where I job shadowed, because you need a medical degree to work or you need the full degree to intern with him. But I hope to get an internship with the company that supplies the manufacture-able parts that they make. So not the custom-made part that fits onto the limb, but like the joints, the knee and the foot and the calf and just other parts of the prosthetics that can be manufactured. They said that they’re looking for interns, so I’m hoping that that I will be able to work there this summer.

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Joy’s Quotes #4

[643-660] I remember my cousins husband talking to me about his work when I was little. Sort of pretending that he’s not talking to himself by talking to a two year old so, growing up I was like, “I will literally never understand any of this.” Then coming back from college I’m like, “Oh, I do actually know what you mean when you’re talking about loops and other basic programming things, and just in general the thought process of going through a project from start to finish.”

Also, last summer, I was able to present the solar cell testing system that I created for the satellite. My part on the satellite was the solar cells and testing them for mass production, because the company that I was working for was trying to output 100 satellites that summer. Very small satellites and so I needed to test over 2000 solar cells because there were 20 solar panels per satellite, and my dad told some of his co-workers about what I was doing and they ended up setting up a meeting for me to come in because they wanted to see what I was working on. Which was crazy because, I don’t know, I guess I just always thought of all those people that work in cubicles as, I don’t know, just like they’re very cool and then I get there and they’re laughing, and they’re having fun and I’m like, “Oh, these are real people.”

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Joy’s Quotes #5

[6-9; 394-403; 428-444] In winter of 2018, we were finishing up the hardest semester so far. So, my third semester, and as final exams were coming, I ended up not sleeping for 52 hours in order to finish everything, and so that was probably the worst part of engineering in the past two years. I realized that I need to go to counseling, and I need to talk to the engineering professors and say, hey, this is a problem. You cannot put any other class through what we went through because that is insane. It’s different if one person was having issues and debating things that shouldn’t be debated about themselves, but if the entire class was having issues, I’m like, “It’s not an entire class of people who are struggling mentally.” It was the classes problem.

So I was able to talk to my professor about the problem because I attend a small school. I was able to go into my professor’s offices and say, “Each of you have assigned major things that are due this week.” I know some of those are hard deadlines because we have people coming from other companies to come to [our university] and judge us on our poster presentation. Since the external judges tell us what they think of how our engineering program is doing, we were unable to negotiate the due date. However, other assignments like take-home exams, and large homework assignments that did not need to be scheduled that week were rescheduled. So, I was able to negotiate with my professor and say, “Hey can you move this deadline to a couple days from now? Then hopefully I’ll be able to get it done by the original deadline. But it just gives us the opportunity to put it off for a little bit and spread things out more evenly.” So I guess being able to negotiate with my professors and work with them helps me navigate the low points of the semester. I knew that they would do that. So that was comforting, and then realizing that I made it through last semester so I can do this.

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Joy’s Quotes #6

[9-16] But after around Christmas break things got better because I was dealing with the stress and recovering from last semester. Then I moved into the [short] term which at my school is a time when you take one class that meets five hours a day for five days a week for the entire month just like you would any other class. The [short] term was intense, but easy. Then towards the end of the [short] term I was getting pretty worried that the spring semester would be similar to last fall.

[17-26] But as the semester started things got significantly better and I realized that last semester was a fluke, and it’s not supposed to be like that. It’s supposed to be hard but not that hard and about four weeks in I realized I had a lot of free time, and that was nice to be able to hang out with people outside of my major, and get eight hours of sleep a night like I wanted to, and eat on a regular basis, and feel confident about the homework that I was submitting. So, I life was going well. As the semester went on a bigger assignment was due and it sort of brought up feelings from last semester on when everything started piling on, and it just became overwhelming. So, I was just overall stressed out.

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Joy’s Quotes #7

[204-217] This semester I’m taking a course called principles of engineering, which involves learning about how both mechanical and electrical interact, and the analogies between them. This class was supposed to be harder than the one I took last semester. Initially I was thinking, “It’s just going to get worse.” And I’m like, “There was no way that I can do what I did last semester again: Just physically or emotionally, or I was still worn out. I was feeling better, but I was still worn out, and so I was just very scared that it was like I’d, “Like after all this time that I put in am I going to flunk out again? And am I going to be…”

So I was preparing myself for the absolute worse and then it ended up not being so bad, and I actually ended up dropping a class to decide to take it over the summer, because I was irrationally having so much anxiety over this semester that I was just like, “I can’t handle this. I need to take a break.” So, I’m down to 14 credits instead of 17, and it’s been really good. The class with the new professor is not fantastic but I’m not failing it, and I don’t feel terrible about myself in that class. I’m not getting A’s but I’m also not failing. So that makes me happy and I’m sleeping and eating.

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Joy’s Quotes #8

[264-267; 270-312] The professor for principles of engineering is actually the chair of the engineering department and he was actually my boss for the satellite project that just got launched into outer space actually last week. Since I had had him as a boss before I felt like I could talk to him one a more personal level than my other professors, and sort of say like, “Hey, are the sophomore classes not doing well? We are very concerned about this class that you’re teaching now.” Because the former professor that taught both circuits and this principle of engineering class, the group of them has left and so that’s why we had new professors for each. The chair of the engineering department was not the one that taught the class last semester. So, they split it up.

Anyway, so he said, “Well, don’t worry about that all.” And he’s like, “From what you’ve probably heard about me I’m an excellent professor.” He’s like, “I’m not trying to boost myself up and make myself look good, but I haven’t had bad reports come back from students. They all like the way that I teach.”

And I knew that I shouldn’t be worried because he was an excellent boss and very lenient. Very good at his skills towards explaining things and engaging his students I knew was really good. Yeah, so the semester started, and he addressed the class on the first day and he said, “We’re just going to talk about, the first lecture we’re going to start out easy. We’re going to go over what you think you know from last semester and we’ll make a list of the things that you think you know, and the things that you were supposed to know from last semester. And we’ll talk about…” He’s like, “I’ll give you a little bit of an intro on myself. Sort of my life story and you can ask whatever questions, and doubts that you have about the semester.” Either in his class or any other class. And that made us all trust him a lot more, and that just set up the semester for success.

Since then he’s done an excellent job of having engaging lectures where he asks questions on a regular basis. If anyone looks confused, he calls them out and he’s like, “Hey, you look confused. What can I do to explain this?” And if he can’t fix it in a couple minutes then he says, “Come to my office hours.” And labs go pretty well too. He’s excellent at answering questions and providing adequate instructions. As the semester goes on the goal of this class is to develop your mind into thinking like an engineer so he gives you, instead of giving you step by step instructions like he did for the first lab it’s more of you have a drone. So, this is our final project. We have a drone and we are supposed to make a thrust measurement system.

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