I’m currently student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio getting my Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering. I entered with the class of 2024, but since I took a semester off to work I’ll graduate at the end of the Fall 2024 semester. At Case, I work as a Student Technician at Sears think[box], the nation’s largest open-access makerspace. When I’m not in Northeast Ohio I’m probably back home with family in Northern Virginia and working on my model railroad 3D printing business, First Person Scale Models.
Throughout my childhood and early adulthood I’ve had several nerdy hobbies and interests, with the common throughline being a passion for making. I like taking ideas from my head into the real world as well as designing commercially viable processes that can bring those ideas into the world efficiently. I’m very grateful that my interests align well with a good career, which was something that I was able to confirm after my great experience as a manufacturing engineering intern at Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics in Akron, OH during the summer of 2023.
While I my educational and experiential focus is engineering, I was fortunate to be able to take an industrial design course at the Cleveland Institute of Art my freshman year of college. During that semester, professor Dennis Futo introduced me to the wonderfully alien world of industrial design education. I was immediately hooked. What struck me the most was how different industrial design education and engineering education are, despite how intertwined the disciplines are. Though I haven’t able to pursue more formal industrial design education yet, I try to incorporate design thinking into all of my projects as I think more engineers should.
When I take on a project, I think about it in terms of both the finished product and the tools and skills I learn in the process. While not every one of those skills may be directly relevant to later projects or my career, I think it’s important to have a diversity of making skills and experiences under my belt. I’ve tried to document a few of those projects at a medium-high level on this site, but feel free to reach out if you have additional questions.