During the fall semester of my freshman year, I took ENGI 120: Introduction to Engineering Design. In this class, you are sorted into groups of four based on your expertise and which project piques your interest. Then you have a semester to learn and implement the basics of the engineering design process by designing and building a medium to high-fidelity prototype that must be completed by the last day of class. My teammates and I were assigned to create a dashboard for the eVan, an old housing and dining Chevy box van with a broken engine which was converted into an electric van by a group of senior design teams.

This was, understandably, quite a daunting task. The first time my team met with Austin, the senior leading the eVan project, I remember thinking to myself, how on earth are we supposed to accomplish this in less than three months? I went into the class without any fabrication experience, and going from never having built anything in my life to building something 6 feet long AND usable was a steep learning curve. Little did I know that in the span of a semester, I would learn how to weld, laser cut, and fabricate successfully enough to build the frame and support structure for our dashboard. This class also confirmed that I like to build and make things in a hands-on environment, assuring me that I could succeed as a chemical engineer. In fact, one of the reasons that I took this class was to see if I genuinely liked making things enough to be an engineer — not all engineering is about fabrication, but for me, making things and engineering are inextricably linked. Thankfully I did, and it gave me the confidence to continue pursuing my engineering degree.

Additionally, thanks to the experience that I had already gained through the class, I had a tangible engineering experience to reference when I interviewed for internships toward the end of the semester. Though I am not certain that it was my ENGI 120 experience that landed me an internship with ConocoPhillips, the class certainly sparked my passion for hands-on engineering and working in the field, which appealed to my interviewers and suited the internship role that I ended up accepting that summer.

Furthermore, while my teammates and I did end up completing the class with a medium-fidelity prototype that was readily installable to the car after the first semester, three of us decided to continue working on the dashboard and the eVan well into our second semester at Rice. Towards the end of the second semester, we entered the HUFF OEDK Engineering Design Showcase (Rice’s annual engineering design showcase and competition) and won excellence in Freshman Engineering Design. This was a semi-lofty goal that we had talked about potentially being able to achieve in the first semester, which actually became reality in the second. Due to the publicity generated by the eVan, my teammates, along with the rest of the eVan team, were featured in the local news and by Rice University. My team was specifically posted on Reggie’s Instagram, one of my proudest first semester moments!

The final cherry on top of my ENGI 120 experience was going back to the OEDK classroom as a sophomore after completing my summer internship and seeing my team’s poster hanging prominently on the wall. (The entire classroom is decorated with cool, previous Rice engineering design projects.) We completed a project that future ENGI-120 students could look up to, and I think the role reversal of being a starry-eyed new student to creating a project worthy of hanging on that wall perfectly encapsulates just how much one can achieve in a year at Rice. 

-Aoife, Wiess ‘27 (Published on 12/5/2024)