Get to know me!
I loved to draw and paint and get creative in any way possible. My dad always drew cartoons (he got that from his mom) and my great grandmother was a studio artist so I had all these people around me that pushed me to explore my creative side all throughout my childhood.
I believe my first engineering project were these two modular car sets that you would build up and watch run. There was only and on/off switch so they could only move in one direction, but I remember getting such a joy out of watching them go. That joy in seeing my work come to life still persists today.
Battlebots. That was the first project at Northwestern that I did where it was completely directed by my team members and I. It's when I first started to feel like a competent engineer as I took lead on manufacturing and ended up creating a pretty cool robot. See the projects section (under NURC) for more about Jaun (our battlebot)!!
Painting. I've taken some pretty cool engineering courses throughout my time in college, but taking a painting course amidst the sea of engineering courses was so relaxing. It was an incredible way to excersize the right side of my brain and de-stress each week.
The summers after my freshman and sophomore years in college I worked at a woodshop in long island called Grain Surfboards. By the end of my time there, I was running skateboard workshops where I would teach kids and adults to build their own wooden skateboards. From this I made a 'Build-it-yourself' Manual so that people could learn to build skateboards at home. There are two reasons why this was my favorite project. The first is that I loved seeing the kids faces during the whole process; the focus and the excitement was just so contagious. The second is that the skills I learned allowed me to build a custom cutting board for my mom. I made it around 2 and a half years ago and that thing is still getting a lot of use today.
In the fall of my sophomore year, I was buddies with the then workshop chair of NURC and he persuaded me to try out the workshop. We worked with neopixel leds and ESP32s. I was hooked immediatly and there was no going back.