Hello everyone! My name is Alberto Lintao and I’m currently a sophomore Mechanical Engineering student from the best residential college (though some will wrongfully disagree) Sid Richardson.
A rare capture of the elusive “Albertus Linopithicus” in its natural habitat: dine-in restaurants
Throughout my Rice career, I’ve had the pleasure of exploring the OEDK, from joining Rice Escape which builds the semesterly escape room for all students to play to getting an early taste for engineering design through ENGI 120, where I helped design an automatic bed-lift voice assistant. But my most crowning achievement has to be through my work on the campus rocketry team, Rice Eclipse. Where I lead the structures division to build, well you can probably guess, rockets!
My L2 certification Pinata Rocket ready to launch!
And as if I don’t spend enough time in OEDK as is, I also work there too. As a lab assistant, I work alongside the technicians to help maintain machinery, and assist the various design teams with any tools and equipment they may need. We’re essentially the glorified wrench monkeys for any engineering club on campus.
Even with that said, there’s still so many things I want to experience and build. But one thing I’ve always thought to be interesting are space suits! For something so important yet overlooked in the grand scheme of satellites and space shuttles, there’s a ton of depth and engineering that goes into them. In fact, NASA has in the past hired fashion design students to work on space suit design to maximize comfortability and style alongside your usual mechanical and bio-engineers. It’ s a very interesting challenge in terms of human survival and couture.
Eclipse’s 12-foot recovery rocket (with paint and finish by yours truly)
Now you may be wondering, why would someone who’s slept in the OEDK before (lounge couches are phenomenal by the way) be taking a prototyping and fabrication class? Well that’s an obvious answer:
To learn.
I’m a student! Not a professional. And there’s still so many things in the kitchen that I’ve barely scraped the surface of. I haven’t touched a single sewing needle before. And don’t get me started on the CNC mills, those manuals are like 30 pages long. But I want to learn those machines, and I want to get better at creating, building, failing at times. Challenging myself, because that’s what engineering is about. I’m excited to become a human factory. And I’m looking forward to this semester of EDES 210!
