Hello everyone! My name is Sara Barker, and I’m a senior Mechanical Engineering student with a minor in Global Health Technologies. Normally, Rice students include their residential college in their introduction, but seeing as my semester consists of senior design, ENGI 210, and also ENGI 301 (Intro to Practical Electrical Engineering), I think it’s safe to say my residential college is basically the OEDK at this point.

Throughout my Rice career, I’ve had a lot of experience in the OEDK, from struggling through ENGI 120 as a freshman, to holding meetings for Engineers Without Borders in the meeting rooms sophomore year, to pulling near-all nighters to fix a robotic bug just in time for a final presentation in Mechatronics class junior year, to finally tackling senior design.

I also even spent last summer interning with Rice360 – here’s a link to the blog I maintained over those six weeks. We built a portable incubator capable of maintaining body temperature for 48 hours on a single charge. I’m pretty proud of making this – we received a simple prototype from a previous group, then completely redesigned it and delivered satisfactory testing data, all in a month and a half.

You might be wondering why someone would willingly take another class in the OEDK given how much time I’ve already been in there. For starters, the OEDK is just a cool place – where else have you ever seen a carbon fiber printer? Also, while I do have some experience with many of the tools in the OEDK, there’s still so much to learn and so many things to make. There’s been a few random ideas floating in my head that I could definitely make myself with the right training and tools – one of those ideas was a headphone stand, and another (admittedly not nearly as practical) idea was a double pendulum. One thing I’m particularly looking forward to learning about is CNC milling, as I haven’t really worked with metal much. But whichever techniques we learn in ENGI 210, I’m looking forward to making something awesome with all of them!