Hello everyone! I am Madison James, one of the Rice interns in the Summer Experience in Engineering Design (SEED) Program. I’m very grateful for this opportunity, and I have enjoyed my work so far. For some more background, I am a rising sophomore majoring in mechanical engineering and minoring in engineering design. I am originally from Florida, so spending my first summer in Houston is interesting (and hot).

For the first week, we were mainly introduced to the program, the other interns, and the projects we would work on. We were presented with project options from the clients, and we ranked the ones we wanted to work on the most. My project is protected by intellectual property, so I can’t reveal too much, but my team is working with a company to help improve their growth of microgreens.

In the beginning, we did a lot of research into our problem, and we met with the client to make sure we understood the scope of the problem. At the end of the week, we were able to order some initial materials for testing. Since a previous team worked on this problem, our process was expedited.

In the second week, we were able to start prototyping solutions and were even able to test growth. Additionally, we had some adjacent problems that needed solutions and worked on solving one of them by using an Arduino setup. Initially, we didn’t think we would need electronics, so this was an interesting turn of events. Overall, we were productive in testing our first iterations and addressing more questions with our clients.

I am looking forward to evaluating our tests next week and seeing if there are any changes we need to make!