Mechanical Engineer

Carpenter

Firefighter-EMT

Outdoors Enthusiast

I am a Mechanical Engineering student at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with a love for woodworking, firefighting, and spending time in the outdoors. Despite the apparent differences between these interests, I have found them to come together surprisingly well into one cohesive education and skillset.

Designing my own furniture and working on residential construction allowed me to work through the design process countless times before and after learning the official process. I grew familiar with shear, bending, and tensile strength before I ever was introduced to them in Statics coursework. While a drywall screw has plenty of shear strength, you wouldn't want to use them to frame a house. Before ever taking a heat transfer class I had already gained a strong intuition and appreciation for heat transfer methods through my time as a firefighter. Ducking behind a wall can prevent a tremendous amount of radiative heat transfer from a fire, while staying on your hands and knees mitigates the effects of free convection. Of course, be careful what you touch, not all solids conduct heat the same. Operating the pump on the engine gave me experience with fluid dynamics that isn't gained just by using Bernoulli's equation. Maintaining adequate pressure at each nozzle requires quick mental calculations to overcome friction loss encountered by the length of deployed hose. (When a friend proofread this, they scoffed, thinking this was portfolio exaggeration, but I swear that is how we do it!). With a pressure dial for the inlet of the system and discharge for each line it acted like a high stakes fluid dynamics lab. Through my endless tinkering with my full suspension mountain bike, I gained more appreciation for the spring and dampening problems I was encountering in system dynamics. I won't get into the mechanical assemblies I've explored a little too in depth through my time interning at the local mechanic and trying to keep my 270k mile Mazda running.

Engineering classwork gave me the analytical abilities to solve complex problems on paper or on the computer. My experiences outside the classroom gave me an intuition of the physical world and the relevance of what I was learning. I believe the combination of the two made me a stronger, more well rounded engineer than I may have otherwise been.