Why engineering? (and a research update)

Hi everyone,

     I only decided I wanted to be an engineer fairly recently - I'm still not sure which discipline (civil
or mechanical) I want to be. Engineering has been on my list of possible careers for a while, probably since sophomore or junior year of high school. However, when I applied to colleges, I wasn't really sure what I wanted to study. I was considering German, archaeology, architecture, physics, and engineering, so it didn't really make sense for me to attend a school that forced you to pick a major when you applied. By the end of my first year at college (after I had taken courses in most of my potential majors), it became clear to me that I was most interested in physics or engineering. Only in the past year (my sophomore year of college) did I realize that pure physics was not the path for me - while the more theoretical physics was OK to learn about, I loved the more practical-oriented sections of my physics courses (DAQ systems, designing electrical circuits, etc.)

EOH robot competition - an annual favorite of mine

    While I only recently decided engineering was right for me, I've been interested in engineering since quite a young age. My family visited the U of I's Engineering Open House every year since I was five or six years old, and that weekend was often a high point of my spring semesters growing up. I was really fascinated by the thousand cool things you could do with physics, chemistry, and various types of engineering, especially as I got older and could understand more and more of the science behind the exhibits. I guess those weekends at EOH were really the first time I was interested in engineering. The different design challenge exhibits (such as the egg drop, newspaper tower, aluminum foil   boat, toothpick bridge, etc.) always drew me in, and I would spend hours designing my structure, testing it, and trying to improve it. So I guess that I've loved those aspects of engineering for nearly my whole life, even though I didn't focus in on them until recently.



     As for my research, it's starting to intensify. My post-doc mentor has returned, so we're really starting to dig into debugging the hydro-mechanical transmission model. In the next week we also hope to build a model of a different configuration option for the same transmission, and determine which configuration would be better to use in real-life applications (one option requires a very costly component, but the other option might not operate very well).