For assignment #2, students were given the task of creating a well windlass from laser-cut Delrin sheets to lift a bottle (our "bucket") from the floor and 10 cm above the table top. My partner Kat and I considered how to include a cranking mechanism, pulley systems, and a stable base for such weight. The requirements: 1) The mechanism could only use 500 sq. cm of Delrin and 50cm of rod. 2) Had to span a gap of 12 cm and be able to lift the top 10cm of the bottle above the tabletop. 3) Had to support a 1 liter bottle of water without wobbling or breaking. During our brainstorming session, we came up with 2 ideas: an obvious, traditional crank using the rod as a spindle and a cracking mechanism based on a pulley system. The latter seemed more suitable as 1) the rod is not durable enough to remain straight with the weight of the bottle and 2) Delrin has a low coefficient of friction, which is attractive for a pulley system. Given the restrictions of a 500 cm^2 sheet o...
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 ...
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...
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