Voices of Baskin Engineering

"Maybe you need to vent about something that’s happening or need questions answered. When this happens, it’s nice to know someone’s there."

“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.”

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

“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.”

"People in the Baskin School of Engineering are willing to collaborate and talk about their projects and be open about the things they’re doing."

"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.”

"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 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 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’m on the iGEM team. We’re developing a cheap and maintainable contraceptive for women in third world countries."

“If you really understand something, that’s better than a grade. Concentrate on learning the foundations.”

"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 would say to any incoming students, if you see any club or any activity that really inspires you or seems like something you would want to do, even if you are not really sure, just go for it. When I started school here, I was a very shy person so I pushed myself to become a global leader, and that really pushed me outside of my comfort circle.

Currently, my project is engineering zymomonas mobilis, a unique organism that has a specific metabolic pathway that helps increase the production of biofuels, specifically ethanol and butanol... Fossil fuels are quickly becoming depleted and are very toxic, so if we were able to find a sustainable synthetic source of fuel, it would be extremely beneficial for overall environmental health.

Students tend to work too hard. Take care of yourself and learn to give yourself time. Making sure your brain is in good shape means giving it a rest.

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.

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.

I like having the freedom to solve problems in multiple ways. There’s never just one way in computer science to solve a problem.

The faculty here are really remarkable in the field and it’s kind of surprising when you can just walk by someone who worked on the Human Genome Project. That’s probably the coolest part about the school.