About Me

Photo Cred: Amos Chan
Welcome to my engineering portfolio -- the comprehensive design blog since my first year!

I'm a Master's student at Boston University and hoping to dive into the world of technology and design. Science is and has always been my first love. Yet, having never taken a formal "engineering" course before college, I was not entirely sure how or where my passion flowed. So, I set forth to take an engineering class my first semester and then continued with coursework towards the Wellesley-Olin Certificate of Engineering, until I made my way into BU's accelerated program for Liberal Arts students (called LEAP).

My goals for my own education and your experience in reading these posts are strengthening my:
  • Capacity to create and think like an engineer and designer
  • Understanding of the relationship between humans and their "stuff"
  • Purpose for all of this growing knowledge
Engineering is at my heart -- and so is having societal impact. I was and still am determined to hone in on my passions, and I'm re-discovering the joy of 'tinkering.' I hope that my own enjoyment pushes you, as well, to engage in your own creativist.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Women of Color in Graduate School

Image
Recently, I've been asked (by a few people) how it feels to go through graduate school as a woman of color. And, to be completely honest, it's incredibly exciting and exhausting all at the same time. Being a woman of color -- specifically a black woman, particularly in STEM -- has a lot of challenges. If you simply search the phrase "black in graduate school," you will get statistics that are very humbling; articles and think-pieces on how different the Black or person-of-color experience is from students who are not minorities; and other outlets detailing how little support many Black and non-Black students of color feel that they have. In fact, the Council on Graduate Schools recently reported that, in 2017, Black students made up just 11.9% of all first-time graduate students in the United States. (That said, 68% of them were women! So, we are making p r o g r e s s.) I'm not sure what the numbers are at Boston University, but it doesn't seem that far o...
Read more

Truss Design (Final)

Image
We finally made it to the end! After the preliminary design report, it was time to finalize our actual design (since we were given enough materials to make one truss to test). After doing a few more draft sketches and analysis, I was able to pick up on patterns on which types of designs produced the maximum strength (all within the parameters we were given). Finally, I came up with the sketch at the bottom-right, and the MATLAB analysis produced the highest load we were able to reach. We theorized that: two members would buckle first instead of just one (Members 3 and 4); the maximum load is 11.62 ± 0.063N; and the total cost of the truss is $290 (under the budget limit). From there, we moved to prototyping: we cut the straws as close as possible to the lengths specified in our final design. To create uniform gusset plates, our "joints," we used the circular cap of an individual Tropicana Orange Juice bottle. It met the area requirements and acted as a stamp...
Read more

Hackathon: TechTogether Boston

Image
iOS app Last weekend, I had the wonderful opportunity to participate in Boston's largest all-female and non-binary hackathon! A group of friends and I wanted to digest as much tech and nerd information as possible, and we basically made it our mission to go to nearly every workshop session offered for two days straight. I don't know how we managed this but we did. From 5p on Friday and all day on Saturday, it seemed I bounced from one room to the next with a nap here and there. There was a workshop on rapid prototyping with AdobeXD -- which I am in love with. Then, I was able to create my first phone application during a workshop on iOS app development with Swift  (it's much easier than I had imagined), followed by a workshop at 2am on Android app developmen t. For my very first hackathon-conference, I wanted to focus on skill development and learning, rather than the competition. However, seeing everyone so wrapped up in their individual designs and programming ...
Read more