Getting involved with student orgs really helps you build community, whether it be a sorority, fraternity, an internship or becoming a BESA ambassador. It helps you find support wherever you go and it’s super helpful.
It’s important to have diversity in engineering because it brings different experiences and ways of thinking to a project, allowing for new and different approaches to problems.
"One thing I’d like to tell students has to do with the genius myth. They often feel like, 'I’m not that genius and therefore, I cannot contribute.' It’s really important to bust that myth."
“I like having an influence on the students I meet. Here, I can really help launch students’ careers in a direction they might not have thought about. I’m really proud of the students."
"I was drawn to robotics because it’s the intersection of different types of engineering all coming together so you get a splash of flavor from different worlds that prepare you to go into many different aspects of engineering."
"I get to work with UCSC astronomers who pursue knowledge about the stars purely for knowledge and I feel like that is so noble. It’s awesome that I get to have a project with a similar philosophical framework.”
"I decided I wanted to work with optofluidics. My principal investigator, Holger Schmidt, wrote the handbook on optofluidics, so I thought, 'I should go work for him.”
“Within BSOE there are many outlets for getting yourself established and that’s a really great thing about UC Santa Cruz. You can always find a place you can consider your home.”
"I’m working on this human trafficking project. The broad question was whether environmental events affect human traffickers. We found an increase in mentions of certain ethnicities after hurricanes in these ads, especially ethnicities from Caribbean countries."
"The most important thing a student needs to learn in their education is not to memorize this or that formula, or do certain calculations at this speed, but really to develop an intuitive understanding and knowledge of what they are learning about."
"When we got the opportunity to start Engineers Without Borders, it really touched my heart that we could help this community in Cameroon, and especially help with young people’s education. That’s something really important."
"If you look at the power consumption of the microprocessor or the CPU, a big chunk of power comes in by the clock network so I proposed a new paradigm of clocking that utilizes current rather than voltage."
"I study functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. They’re basically brain scans that are done while people are doing something. We’re trying to figure out what parts of the brains are being used for different things."
"I want to work in integrating robotics into the emergency response system so if a hurricane hits, or something like that, the first responders would be helped out by a variety of robotic tools that they could use."
“It’s important for a college to support engineering organizations and provide students the free time to be involved with them. There’s a good balance of academic and non-academic activities here.”
"Throughout my time as a graduate student here, I was very fortunate to be able to research with faculty members who are globally known for their work. "
"UC Santa Cruz has a good core set of professors working in data science and machine learning. There’s a broad spread of research interests among professors within the department."