Prior to the first week, I had much anticipation for the Rice SEED/360 internship and how it would pan out for the next 6 weeks and I’m glad to say I really enjoyed this first week. The presentations were extremely helpful how they presented information on the Engineering Design Process and I very much enjoyed the workshops. Developing skills and characteristics as not only an engineer, but as a person were things I experienced when taking ENGI 120 during my freshmen fall semester and what encouraged me to apply to SEED. These workshops definitely showed that Rice SEED/360 was very much as invested in my personal development as I was.

For this internship, my team and I will be working with Texas Heart Institute to develop a model to mimic the lung heart model for the purpose of testing their wireless pacemaker. I spent much of the first week researching background information for device pertaining to lung heart motion and the function of pacemakers. During our meeting with our clients at THI on Friday, our team was introduced to the saline-immersed apparatus that THI wants our device to function in. Much focus was given by our clients on having our model accurately depict the combine contractions and motions of the lung and heart on the tissue they will have clamped in the system. Creating the accurate motion of the lung heart motion has definitely shown to be a challenge, but is something I am really excited to take on during this internship. I am also very much excited to work with the colleagues on my team with each person bringing their own different backgrounds to develop a useful and functional solution. Much of this next week will be spent defining and decomposing our design criteria and brainstorming ways to mimic the lung heart model on the actual tissue in the saline solution. Hopefully, our team can ideate some possible innovative solutions for our client meeting we plan to have again some time towards the end of this week.