The Magic of Engineering for the Customer
Creating a schedule for the first time can be a daunting task, especially for a first year engineering student. There are so many aspects to consider…
When I was little, my mom used to let me take these “quiet play time naps”. Being the middle child, my sister was too old to be napping but my younger brother still needed one every day. That left me in the limbo of probably still needing a good mid-day schluff but insisting that I was grown up enough to stay awake the whole day. As a compromise, my mom would let me quietly play with some toys in my room as sort of a cross between napping and getting to have grown-up play time. Alone in my room and feeling pretty great about not having to nap, I’d sit cross legged and build with my LEGOs. I loved to build houses in particular and then I’d create my own little alien people to live in them. Without fail, twenty minutes into my “quiet play time” I’d give into that post-lunch sleepiness and fall face first into my pile of LEGOs. Even after I outgrew my quiet play times, I still loved to tinker.
Fast forward to Junior year of high school. I’ve had my heart set on going to Tufts for over a year now. Besides having the most awesome mascot ever, their softball team was wrecking all the competition and the balance between engineering and liberal arts was just what I was looking for (not to mention my Mom and my Nana both went there so that was pretty cool). I became interested in engineering through a program called Project Lead the Way. This is a pre-engineering sequence of classes for high-schoolers, and getting to make stuff with a laser cutter pretty much sealed the deal for me. As a senior, you got to take the capstone course called Engineering Design and Development. The whole idea of the class is to pick a real world problem and spend the duration of the year coming up with a solution. I decided that my problem would be how America doesn’t generate enough American engineers, and spend the year developing elementary school engineering programs to abolish misconceptions and interest students at a young age.
As I researched material for my proposal (aka did a google search), the first twenty or so results were all from this place called the Tufts Center for Engineering Education and Outreach (CEEO). This guy Chris Rogers seemed to have all the answers I was looking for, and to my delight he was a mechanical engineering professor at Tufts! I eagerly fired off an email explaining my project and how desperately I wanted to come to Tufts (ok I had my mom proof it first because spelling is not my strong suit) and waited to here back. The next day after school, Chris had already replied with his typical “This is cool, keep me posted” message. I was feeling pretty great about it, so you can imagine how happy I was when a month after school ended, Chris shot me an email saying, “Hey, how’d you like a job? We’ll send you some LEGOs and you can play around with them for us and give us some feedback and curriculum ideas.”
Well I was pretty much besides myself. I got to work for Tufts, and they were going to pay me to play with LEGOs, LEGO Robotics none the less. My high school senior capstone project was a huge success, and I continued to work on small LEGO projects for Chris. When I finally got to Tufts, the very first thing I did alone in my dorm room was fire off an email saying “Hey! I’m finally on campus, I have my LEGOs and I’m ready to work.” The CEEO is my favorite part of being a Tufts student. This past school year I got to work with Story Starter kits on integrating literacy and engineering, help organize a LEGO Competition in China, and complete a project where I built the same robot out of the top six education robotics platforms on the market. At one point I had a huge army of robots under my bed, which was lots of fun on several of our snow days last semester. I was also a STOMP Fellow, which is a program through the CEEO that sends Tufts students into local schools to teach engineering. Best of all, I’ve gotten to work with amazing people who all share my excitement about creating a more hands-on, minds-on approach to learning, and none of whom give me a hard time when I show up to meetings in my sweaty practice t-shirt and sweatpants (the softball thing worked out too).
So the moral of the story is the following: never be afraid to send an email. If you’re passionate about something and someone else shares that passion you never know what can happen (in my case, they become your college advisor). Second, you’re never too old to play with LEGOs, maybe you’ll even make a career out of it.
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