Hi, this is Harry Zhu speaking.
Back from my cozy home in Shanghai, China, I arrived in Houston to begin my new quest for engineering design. As I just got off the plane and exited the airport, the Houston summer temperature gave me a hard strike. The heat was in waves and smashed on my face. Experiencing summer’s welcome, I arrived at the apartment. Looking at the empty room, I realized my journey had started from now.
As a Rice student, I am familiar with the campus, but only during the school year. The summertime campus is strangely quiet. There were so few people around and most places were taken over by energetic squirrels. As I stepped into the OEDK, the once-crowded place was echoing with silence. Waiting in the classroom, I met my fellow Rice co-workers and students from Nigeria. As the icebreaking session started, everyone shared their own story with the entire group. The joy, excitement, and laughter soon filled the OEDK, bringing the energy back to OEDK once again.
Nervous yet more exciting and curious, the project revealed one by one. At first, the project for building a water sample collection system for a Rice research professor caught my eye, since this project required various knowledge in mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. However, after listening to Dr. Holmes’ in-depth explanation of the Big-S project, I chose to work on this project to renovate the farming technology of the next generation. I met three other Rice students who also chose this project: Alexis, Brad, and Madison.
Our team gathered the next day and started discussing what our goal was in this project. We soon understood that we were working on a fast-paced project that required fast prototype iterations. Without much hesitation, we started to reach out to our client and started to get a more in-depth view of the project. Combined with the research we had done; our team was able to start doing simple idea testing and prototyping in the second week.
As the program progressed, I also attended various lectures about how to make me a more successful engineer and workshops on attaining the important knowledge for prototyping. Besides working, we also had fun networking lunches with industry-leading researchers and Rice alumni. The conversation with the Rice 360 program leader gave me more insight into how to develop the team’s project.
Also, one of the extra benefits I didn’t realize while selecting this project is that our team can eat all the harvested microgreens! The taste of the radish microgreen is amazing. The mildly spicy flavor with the fresh taste makes me unable to resist eating more.
Although this is just the beginning of the internship, I can feel how this is different from the usual college class. The fast and intense pace makes the collaboration between teammates more important. Just from the past two weeks, I already learned a lot about communication with clients, data collection, and variable-controlled testing methods. Starting next week, our team will test our prototypes and start to collect data. I am looking forward to learning more knowledge and making more connections in the rest of the project time.
