Picoturbine Personal Statement

When I was younger, I wanted to be a medical doctor, I remember thinking that those people could really help people. As I grew older, and my lack of affinity for biology and other medical related things presented itself, I turned to teaching. I thought then at least I could help students and make their lives better. However, as I got older and my talents for math and science began to truly develop I diverted from teaching and focused on engineering. I went to an engineering driven high school where I learned engineering principles. Finally I thought that I knew what I wanted to do, sure maybe I wouldn’t be helping people directly, but this surely this was my calling. After entering college and starting my bachelor’s degree in civil engineering, …show more content…
PicoTurbine’s mission is to teach young students STEM skills. I worked with students as young as four to teach them basic engineering principles as well as lessons in sustainability and environmental engineering. I still work with PicoTurbine part time to develop and teach curriculum. I believe it is really important to teach engineering to young students. I feel like school focuses too much on step-by-step lessons, we teach students how to do things “the right way” so that they can get good grades, rather than teaching creative engineering processes. When I’m writing curriculum for the students I always focus on the fact that in engineering and the scientific method, there are no wrong answers, instead we just refine and …show more content…
I didn’t necessarily want to do that for the rest of my life, but it was a lot of fun. The answer came to me in an email from my academic advisor- that Dr. Michel Boufadel from the Center for Natural Resources Development and Protection was looking for undergraduate research assistants. In the civil engineering department there were not a lot of opportunities for undergraduate research, least of all water resources or environmental engineering. Dr. Boufadel was looking for students with an interest in environmental engineering and environmental fluid mechanics. As I started to do research with Dr. Boufadel I was bounced between a few projects before there was a good fit. Eventually, I was told to start working on a stormwater model of campus and to try to find places where we could implement green infrastructure. I was also told to go to Newark Doing Infrastructure Green (DIG) meetings to learn about Newark’s Green Infrastructure plan. This would also give NJIT an opportunity to show work to the city of Newark and work on