If there’s one thing that has profoundly changed in my perspective as a result of my internship at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK), it’s the realization that the world is full of endless possibilities. Gosh! 🫡

From the myriad of machines and tools at the OEDK that brilliant minds have utilized to create amazing innovations, to the groundbreaking technologies I have seen around Houston, I am convinced beyond doubt that there’s so much brilliance and creativity in this world. I cannot count the number of times I have muttered to myself, “Wow, how is this even possible?” at the sight of these innovative and awesome creations.

The extremely tall, beautiful buildings and sleek cars I encounter almost every five minutes, the countless automatic doors I’ve walked through, the advanced emergency alert systems, and the new technologies I’ve had the opportunity to use are all astonishing. This may not seem extraordinary if you are used to these systems or structures, but for me, it’s a revelation. It’s my first time in a first-world country, and I cherish everything that has made life so much easier and more enjoyable. I am constantly in awe of how things work here—it’s so different from what we have in my home country.

But it’s not all about work and technology. We also embarked on some incredible adventures that left me awe-struck. I went ice skating for the first time ever and had so much fun learning how to skate, falling down several times, and eventually getting the hang of moving and balancing on ice. 😂  I also visited the Houston Zoo and the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences. These experiences were beyond thrilling. I saw things I had never seen or even imagined existed and kept wondering how people came up with such great innovations.

(Some interns at The Galleria, Houston.)

(The African interns at the Houston zoo.)

(3/100+ I took at the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences. 🤩)

Visiting the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was the pinnacle of my experiences. “Mind-blowing” doesn’t even describe it. I took a tour of the Christopher C. Kraft, Jr. Mission Control Center, where NASA coordinates and monitors all human spaceflight missions. I read about the Apollo mission, the historic endeavor that landed humans on the moon. I also saw the Saturn V rocket, the most powerful rocket ever built, the space shuttle, a marvel of reusable spacecraft technology, and more! These firsthand encounters with space exploration history left me in awe of human ingenuity and the boundless possibilities of engineering and science. I’m captivated! Gosh!

(Very few of the pictures I took at NASA.😂)

Again, there is so much brilliance and creativity in this world. There truly are great minds out there, and I am determined to train my mind to exude such great brilliance and creativity too. I really am!

As Albert Einstein once said,

“Engineers create that which has never been.”

I want to be that engineer. I will be that engineer! 

It’s only a matter of time. So help me God. Amen. 🧎‍♀️🤲🏾

“Engineering is the closest thing to magic that exists in the world.” – Elon Musk

Amidst the natural disasters and the follow-up inconveniences, this penultimate week has given me ample time to sit alone and reflect on the good times. Especially the past few weeks.

The whole internship has been somewhat like a trip to the future. Coming from a setting that doesn’t place enough importance on hands on application, this experience has been a breath of fresh air. It allowed us pose as engineers for a while, think and act like them too. And for me, it certainly rejuvenated my interest in engineering.


The first thing I realised was how beneficial it was working with people of similar interests and knowledge and yet diverse experiences. The Rice360 internship is a very diverse place. It’s the most diverse I’ve seen, {15 people, 9 countries}. And because of that, everyone has different conditionings. Different mindsets, heartsets and soulsets that’s infused in everything they do, say or think.
It’s this same feature that allows other people see the weaknesses your ideas or even help complete them.

Usually, I prefer to work alone but now I’m more open to collaborating with others. Without a team, many defects go unnoticed and many ideas go unrealised. It’s literally all in your head and that can only go so far.



As there’s been a lot of cutting, glueing, planning, programming, calculating and designing for our Automated water sampling machine. There, I learnt it’s nice to not confine yourself to one scope of engineering. I’ve always had many interests, so I ventured into subjects outside my field of electrical engineering. I’ve explored structural, mechanical, computer and materials engineering and by chance, many of the skills I acquired during this pursuit came out to be rather useful. I’m able to work on just any part of the project and it’s fun getting to do so many things in the same project.
It also helped me realise many things that I’m yet to learn, or understand.


I appreciate that the experience is based on the actual process engineers employ. And doing that, I got to tick off most of the skills I wrote down before starting the internship. For instance, my fabrication skills are much better thanks to working with the mechanical engineering student {Brandon} on our team. I don’t just use hot glue for everything anymore.
And I learnt more about programs version control and electrical requirements from the Electrical student {Deepak}. We got to practice live, alternating between different roles and I’ll surely be going back ohm with an amplified knowledge base. (I apologise for the bad puns…)


Working on one thing for hours a day for weeks, made me appreciate the effort that goes into everyday technologies. It’s been revealed that nothing will ever go as planned 😂. In prototyping, everything that could go wrong will and most of the experience is just you correcting errors, crushing bugs or quietly praying you don’t blow anything up. It’s 10% building or programming and 90% fixing things and ideas that just weren’t ‘good enough’.
A strong understanding of the concepts is needed, but even at that the practical application says something else. You spend most of the time figuring out why something doesn’t work. And when it does, you spend extra time figuring out why it does work and what you can learn from that.
This experience helps to build mental models that can be applied in other situations to minimise the errors by seeing the problem or likely problem from afar.


I’ve also learnt that being an engineer isn’t just being good at calculus. Of course that help, but engineers are also good technicians, idea people, communicators, scientists, researchers, speakers, team workers and leaders. Wearing different hats and performing different tricks is what makes us!

I learnt to appreciate each step in the engineering design process was important and what a difference it made for our endeavours. The hours of research, the rigorous testing, the problem definition and criteria happened to be the pacesetter for the transformation that would follow.

We’re going further in our endeavours and even though the circumstances aren’t the finest, we’ve got the grits to push through.

It gets messy before it becomes beautiful. Trust the process!

Before I go, I’ll ask you, how many engineers does it take to make something awesome and magical?
None, they don’t need to be engineers… yet.

Hi guys! It’s Rohan here with my first blog post as part of the SEED Program at the OEDK. We’ve just finished the third week of the program, and I can’t wait to share some of the details with y’all.

A little background about me – I am a Cell Biology and Genetics major with a minor in Global Health Technologies. Ultimately, my goal is to go to medical school and become a physician. I got to know about the SEED internship through Rice360 – I was interested in pursuing an internship in which I would be creating medical technologies for low-resource settings. On the first day, I realized that I was the only non-engineer in the internship. I was slightly apprehensive about this fact at first. How would I be able to keep up with my colleagues without much engineering experience? However, I pushed these feelings aside and leapt out of my comfort zone.

I ended up choosing a project proposed by Dr. Alfredo Gei, an obstetrician-gynecologist in the Texas Medical Center. He was having trouble visualizing the length of the cervix in pregnant women, a metric that is directly related to the likelihood of preterm birth. He wanted us to come up with an imaging method that would better allow him to see the external opening of the cervix during a transvaginal ultrasound, as well as a model to test this method.

This project was right up my alley! I am interested in the medical field, and this would be a great way to incorporate that interest into my work with SEED. Through this project, I met my teammates – Brooke, Precious, and Alinafe. Brooke is a mechanical engineer, Precious is a petroleum engineer, and Alinafe is a biomedical engineer. We have a group that is extremely diverse in disciplines, so we have a great opportunity to work together with our diversity of thought.

During our first week, we mainly did background research on our problem. We researched the mechanisms of transvaginal ultrasounds, previous cervical models, previous contrast agents for ultrasounds, and many other things. Ultimately, we decided to focus on the model of the vagina, cervix, and uterus first – without this model, it would be impossible to actually test our gel. Thus, we got to brainstorming, with a focus on our model.

We came up with many ideas during our brainstorming phase. We proposed 3D-printing a mold for the organs, which we would fill with silicone. We also proposed creating a cube of silicone, and then simply carving out the organs. We proposed making a negative mold of the organs and pouring silicone around them. Then, we found something that would make the whole process easier. There exists a material that can be used in a 3D resin printer that mimics human tissue better than many silicones. Being able to 3D print the organs would make the process much easier.

We then consulted with Dr. Meaghan Bond and Professor Jackie Foss from the Rice360 Institute for Global Health Technologies – my wheelhouse :). They gave us several ideas from other teams that created ultrasound models – they used different types of silicones, augmenting them with other materials to make them more echogenic in ultrasounds. They also gave us the advice to simultaneously work on two methods of production, in case one of them doesn’t work. With that in mind, we decided to work on these two methods:

1. Create a 3D model of the vagina, cervix, and uterus and print it out of the resin material
2. Create a negative of those organs, 3D print that, fill it with silicone, and pull the negative out

With a clear direction in mind, we set off. According to our research, we created models out of gelatin using the negatives that we were going to use in the future with silicone. Several articles claimed that a 17% gelatin mixture mimics human tissue well. Unfortunately, upon testing in Dr. Gei’s office, this turned out not to be true. We scrapped that idea and continued to iterate using other methods. We made a silicone model out of Dragon Skin Skin FX Silicone, meant to mimic human skin. 

Now, we are in our (hopefully) final stages of creating our model. We’re waiting for final edits from Dr. Gei before we print using our desired material and start assembling the model. From there, we can start working on the other part of our design – creating a better transvaginal ultrasound imaging protocol.

Thanks for reading everyone!

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.

On a sunny Monday morning I parked my bike outside the doors of the OEDK for the thousandth time. I stepped through the doors like I had done so countless times as a student. However,  this was the first time I was an intern in the OEDK. It honestly didn’t feel very different. When I met all the other interns and faculty on the first day during the various icebreakers, I almost felt like I was back in ENGI120 as a freshman. During the afternoon of the first day, we were assigned our projects.

As Dr. Holmes revealed the names of the interns assigned to each project, I was quite nervous as I believed that the project I was assigned to would define my 7-weeks in the SEED Internship. When my name appeared under the River Sampling project I was relieved because this was one of the projects I was interested in working with. Amongst my name were the names of three other interns I had not met before. When we got together for the first time I learned that one of them, Brandon, was a fellow Rice student, while Motun and Dara were international students. I was excited to work with them on this project as part of team FlowMetrics. This was beginning to feel very similar to my first day in ENGI120 nearly two years.

As we went over the goals for this project and for the internship as a whole, I began to wonder, what do I want to achieve?

While the ultimate goal is to produce a design that meets the intended objects, I thought about my personal goals for this internship. Unlike in ENGI120, I was not working towards a grade. Unlike my involvement in my Rice Flight design club, I was not working towards a competition. Unlike in those endeavors, I was not bounded by a mark on a transcript or a number on a judge’s scorecards. I could make the most of this internship as an opportunity to work on technical and personal goals.

As I pondered my goals, I thought, “well obviously, I want to become a better engineer”. Then I began listing all the circuit-building, coding, and other technical skills I wanted to develop. However, I realized that being a good engineer was more than having technical expertise. In fact, if I was assigned to a different project I may not have had the chance to develop this specific subset of skills I was keen on.

I needed to find goals that would transcend this specific project. I decided that figuring out what made this internship opportunity unique. I looked around at my fellow interns. Around half of them were international students from various countries in Africa. Despite being in a brand new environment, all of them seemed very comfortable and were confidently talking with us Rice students. I would have definitely been more shy and nervous if I were in their shoes. I had my first goal; I scribbled down “Become more confident in meeting and learning from new people”. There was definitely a lot I could learn from the unique experiences of my fellow interns.

Then I remembered how relieved I was when I was assigned to the River Sampling project because its scope would allow me to develop the technical skills I was interested in. Would I have been as happy if I was assigned to a different project? I realized that, I would likely have been disappointed and disheartened with a project that was unrelated to electrical engineering and would have failed to make the most of the internship. My next goal was thus to become more open to different opportunities even if they are different from what I want or expect.

This seemed to be a good starting point. In our client interviews, team discussions, and research sessions that took place during the rest of the week, I found ways to actively work towards those goals. I hope that as we work on the brainstorming and prototyping phases over the coming weeks, I will be able to develop these goals further and improve my contribution to my team!