About Me

I’m Eleanor, and I’m a sophomore at Rice from Houston, Texas. I’m majoring in Bioengineering and planning to minor in Global Health Technologies. In high school, I had the opportunity to work with Rice and the Bioscience Research Collaborative through Rice 360, an international institute for global health. My summers at Rice 360 sparked my love for biomedical engineering and tackling global issues with an engineering perspective. I took ENGI 120 in the spring semester of my freshman year, which introduced me to the engineering design process and eventually led me to the SEED program!

First Week

The first week has been busy and long, but it’s been so fun meeting all the other interns and learning about how diverse our perspectives are. There are students here from many different departments and majors, but everyone is driven by a passion for helping people through thoughtful design. We all dove right in on the first day at the project fair, getting to explore this year’s projects and ask questions directly to each client. Energy was high and everyone was excited about taking on a new challenge. We wrapped up day one by submitting our project rankings, leaving it to the leadership team to match us onto the project teams we’d be with for the next seven weeks.

The next morning, project teams were revealed! I was thrilled to see I had been paired with my first choice project – a charging and sanitizing station for handheld NEST 360 devices. My previous work with Rice 360 was working directly with several of the NEST bundle devices, so I was really excited to take on this (brand new!) project. You can see my team in the picture below! I promise I’m not a foot shorter than everybody else – it’s my chair…

We were all really excited to get started.

We spent the rest of the week coordinating with our client, preparing for our first interview with her, and starting background research to understand the context of the problem. One of my favorite aspects of the program so far has been the open communication between teams. In ENGI 120, our teams were so wrapped up in completing our own projects (as well as all our other classwork) that we almost never heard what other teams were up to. Now that we have so much time to devote to the program as interns, though, we’re able to check in daily and really understand where everyone is and the cool things they’re getting to do. I’m really looking forward to the next six weeks, and getting to start a brand new project for an organization that I care so much about!