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joy quotes

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 quotes

Joy’s Quotes #2

[301-311] The majority of our time is spent on projects. We usually have one hands on project where we are responsible for creating a poster and designing a PowerPoint presentation for the end of the semester. Most of the time, we are focused on homework. The classes require 40 hours per week including lab assignments and lab reports. We had to spend many hours outside of the lab working on them. Then it took five to six hours to write the lab report and they ended up being fifteen to twenty pages. I shouldn’t have to go through that again. I’m very thankful because it kind of destroyed all of us.

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joy quotes

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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lauren quotes

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 quotes

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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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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quotes tchuck

Tchuck on Choosing Engineering

[15-21] [East coast university] was kind of my back up. But I ended up getting the best worth for my money basically I got a bunch of money from [East coast university] and also [East coast university] has a really good engineering school, like all the schools I applied to had a decent engineering school but [East coast university]’s obviously very good for engineering. So I ended up coming here. I’m in honors college here. I also pledged, I’m also in a fraternity here.

[113-119] When I came to [East coast university] I looked at them and I thought biomedical sounded pretty cool. I went through and they showed me this tour and it was like, I think the people at [East coast university] that do research were looking at something like eyedrops that fix blindness to an extent, there was something about a robotic arm that would be able to perform surgery. So I was like that’s pretty cool. And I did well in bio and I like science and obviously I like math. So that’s what I ended up going with.

[125-127; 130-132] I actually came in under the major engineering entrepreneurship, which initially I applied to that because I was like, alright I’m not 100% sure what I want to do, like I like biomedical, but I wanted to come in as generic […]And what it ended up being was a completely different thing, like it’s what you would think trying to start your own company and make stuff, whatever along those lines. So pretty quickly I transferred into biomed.

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quotes tchuck

Tchuck’s Quotes #1

[195-201] So basically the idea is to get experience with engineering and all this stuff. What ended up happening was freshman engineering clinic was, it was alright, basically. They talked about a lot of stuff that I already knew. They went over like units and sig figs, conversions, stuff along those lines that wasn’t too difficult. They also went over, we went over engineering ethics which obviously is important so I do appreciate that although that’s been talked about in like every single one of the engineering classes so it gets a little repetitive. Obviously it’s important.

[232-236] And for the second half we had to, we had to use code to optimize a wind turbine and then build it. So we had to figure out what parameters we wanted, what we wanted it to look like, the shape of the blades and all that stuff. And then we built it and tested it at the end. So that I feel like is relevant.

[213-217] I would say the clinic as a whole I’m pretty sure is good. I’m looking forward to junior and senior clinic because that’s when we get like actually research projects. We’re literally going to be doing and making stuff. And I think we work our entire junior year on one thing, and our entire senior year on another thing. So it’ll actually be relevant and something that we get some say in it.

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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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anna quotes

Anna on Choosing Engineering

[42-45; 239-248; 258-260; 263-269] Retrospectively, I think that it has been worth it because it’s made me a lot more adaptable and it made coming to college actually really easy because I already knew what it was like to start out with no friends, no one, to have to adapt to a completely different set of rules and standards and to just go from the start. For example, since my high school focused on science and technology, I really had that opportunity to sort of become a scientist but what I realized when working senior year on my research project is that scientist spend their whole lives delving into a problem, laying it out, describing it, but they don’t solve it at all and I don’t think I would be able to live such big issues on my shoulders that I could do nothing about. I feel like engineering is related to science in that you use science to solve problems. I absolutely live for the moment where you solve the problem. I couldn’t do that with such pressing matters like microplastics, oh my gosh, it’s absolutely crushing to have to think about that sort of stuff all the time. Although my mom still thinks that I should be a scientist, it’s just not for me although I really do value the experience of being able to try it out. She has made it very clear that she sort of sees me more as the scientist type then the engineer type. She also doesn’t love that I’m in a career that’s mostly men, but I don’t really care about that because anything they can do I can better. She really pushed me to be the best I could and be as creative as I could. I think she’s definitely the one who made me a bit of a perfectionist. As for other influential people in my life, definitely my senior research teacher. The best teacher I’ve ever had, really an amazing woman.

[101-108; 92-93] In high school, I also took a AP Physics course which was centered around electricity and magnetism and for the first half the year we learned about electricity and the second magnetism and then at the very last minute, like three weeks before the end of the year my physics teacher started teaching us about light and how it’s where electricity and magnetism come together and that’s the moment that it clicked for me and physics sort of fell into place and I had that brilliant aha moment. It made me really feel like an expert and I saw classes like electricity and magnetism in my college curriculum was like, I want to study engineering because that’s where science and design and math and technology all meet up. I feel like it’s such a varied field you can do whatever you want with it.

[93-94; 94-98; 195; 207-211] At the end of my freshman year, I decided to declare my major as electrical engineering. I looked at the curriculums for each major. I read the descriptions of the classes and I felt pulled toward the more electromagnetism classes, along with courses focused on computer architecture and digital logic design.  I still don’t really know what I want to do as an Electrical Engineer. I have a lot of time to figure it out and develop that career path, but I really did like working with the hardware in front of me as I was trying to type out the software. I’m really hoping that my first co-op will give me sort of more insight into what there is out there because I don’t really know.  My first co-op starts in April at a steel mill and my first project is going to be I guess assembling, installing, and coding/setting up a robot arm which stamps steel-plates with their identification number.

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