Me with the Durango & Silverton

Hello everyone, my name is Owen! I’m a junior majoring in Political Science, and I’m from the best college on this campus… BROWN! I’m a photographer at the Rice Thresher and part of the Aero-Recovery and Social teams for the E.C.L.I.P.S.E rocketry club (pretty out of this world; y’all should join). I’m also an avid mapmaker, and even though I missed the golden age of exploration by a few hundred years, I’ve made it a four-year goal to chart out every hidden and inaccessible corner of this university. Most importantly though, I race in BSWBEER BIKE! I’m the captain of Brown’s bike squad and the president of the Rice Cycling & Triathlon team, because I just couldn’t get enough of riding endlessly in circles around the parking lot.

Although my indecisive search through different majors has led me to PoliSci, I haven’t forgotten my MechE roots, and as such have spent an inordinate amount of time at the OEDK. During EDES 220 last semester, my goated design team and I (RedVault supremacy) designed a geological cache storage device for the Rice Robotics Club’s martian rover prototype. This glorified dirt box was one of my first introductions to utilizing the full breadth of the engineering design process; a process packed night to night with endless redesigns and a never-ending stream of new design constraints. This was paired with my ongoing work on an L1 certification rocket for E.C.L.I.P.S.E, an experience that taught me how to use a laser cutter, that missiles are much more than their fin shape, and that you can’t get by with just one half of the epoxy mix.

I should note that I have a bad habit of forgetting things that I’ve built not long after I’ve made them, so I can’t exactly say what I’m most proud of building. I reconstructed my uncle’s roommate’s girlfriend’s (now wife!) grandpa’s house’s fence gate this summer though, so I’ll throw that one out there

. I would really love to cast my own carbon bike frame one of these days, and maybe eventually work on developing orbital space telescopes. Because that will probably take awhile, in the meantime, I want to learn how to operate all of the OEDK’s advanced fabrication tools, from 3D printers to the lathes in the machine shop. At the end of the day, my goal is to leave Rice having learned a thing or two, and EDES 210 is no different in that regard!