Hey I’m Alice, a junior at Baker College, Rice University. I am majoring in Mechanical Engineering and also aim to complete minors in Business, History and Engineering Design. In my free time, I bake and cook as well as hang out with friends. I am also very competitive and love to play sports – I play on Torque, the Rice Women’s Ultimate Frisbee team and recently re-founded the Rice Women’s Rugby Club. I also swim, play powderpuff and play basketball. I work as a lifeguard so chances are, if you can’t find me around Baker, I’ll be at the rec, either working, or working out. I love to travel – in my freshman year I went to Costa Rica on the iSEED program with Dr. Wettergreen – and I recently studied abroad at the National University of Singapore whilst taking the opportunity to explore Southeast Asia.

In college, I was a member of the Engineering Academy where we worked on a variety of Engineering Design projects, my favourite of which was the design and prototyping of a ‘Lunar Rover’. We were tasked with creating a collapsible and compact electric vehicle which could be taken up to the moon and utilised by astronauts in their collection of samples. We were given a set of strict constraints including weight, dimensions and capacity. These all challenged us to think outside the box to meet our design criteria.

Last year I baked a wedding cake and I am very proud of how it turned out. It was a very long and stressful process so I am both proud of how I planned my time to ensure I was finished in time (barely, but I made it) and how I faced challenges that I encountered along the way. I was very surprised by how much the construction process resembled that of an engineering design project which showed me how common engineering is in our daily lives.

Whilst in Southeast Asia, I travelled around on motorbikes, scooters and derivatives of these vehicles. Each country had their own – tuk-tuks, tricycles, rickshaws and so on. At some stage, I would like to build a motor vehicle like this.

I enrolled in ENGI 210 hoping that it will provide me with further design experience and new skills in prototyping. In particular, I’m looking forward to learning different metal cutting techniques such as plasma cutting and water jet cutting.

– Alice