Hi everyone! Nice to meet you all. My name is Amit Niyogi and I am a first year Mechanical Engineering PhD student here at Rice. I just finished my undergrad at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where I studied Materials Science and Engineering. I live a little off campus, but I work at the BRC and feel that it will become my home in a couple weeks.
Currently I am not part of any activities or clubs at Rice University, but I want to join a couple. One that I want to be apart of is the Mechanical Engineering Graduate Student Association. I think it will be important to interact with other people who are taking the same course but also going through the same struggles in research. I also think it is important to advocate for graduate students to the department. I also want to be apart of the Rice University Indian Student Association. I never got a chance to join when I was an undergraduate student and do not know too much about my own culture so I think it would be a good idea to meet other Indian people to learn about some customs.
On thing that I have made that I am proud of is my water garden pond. I wish I had a picture of the entire thing to show you’ll but instead I have a picture of me lying down in a deep hole I dug. It took a lot of work and energy to dig all the trenches, but it took even more work to put the pond liner and make sure there were no holes. After, I applied the pumps and had to make sure that the amount of water leaving the system was the same as the amount of water entering the system.
I’m very excited to learn about all the different tools, CNC, 3-D printing, wood working to name a few. I am really into making a dioramas and have often been inspired by cities and castles that I see in different countries in Europe. I am especially amazed by the city of Venice since it is a city covered in water. I want to make a diorama based on that, yes with water as-well. However it requires a mini pump system and buildings with specific geometries. I was hoping I could 3-D print all these buildings with the renaissance period architecture to use in my dioramas. I can not simply buy all these things at the store. I am also excited to learn about CNC machining simply because that is also a skill that I need to develop for my research. Being able to use CAD models and then CNC machine them for microfluidic devices. There are alot of skills here that can help me with my research. Also I thought I mention, if I could, I would love to build a 3-D printer that makes gummies.
Random Mammal Picture: 
