Tag: why engineering?

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joy quotes

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 quotes

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 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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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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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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john quotes

John on Choosing Engineering

[37-40] Well, once I saw that the engineering career was more than … More than finding something … As soon as I saw engineering as more than just sitting down at a computer and running tests over and over again. The more I saw the design aspect it really resonated with me.

[110-112] Also, apparently [Midwestern university] has a 97[%] hiring rate [for] graduating [engineers], so that attracted me to it, because as a performing visual arts person I was always worried that I’d be that starving artist stereotype.

 [125-128] I knew I didn’t want to do electrical, because I don’t like circuits very much, but I really agreed with industrials making stuff more efficient, and making improvements onto existing systems […] I’m really in engineering because I like design, so I decided to go for mechanical.

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