About Me!
My name is Alexus Arizola and I am a rising sophomore at Rice and a member of Will Rice College studying Computer Science.
My take on the classic headshot as a Rice student in the Academic Quad.
Journey to SEED
At Rice, every new incoming student is required to take a Freshman Writing Intensive Seminar (FWIS) course during their freshman year. With writing being one of my most dreaded pursuits, I was sure I was going to despise any FWIS course I enrolled in. Fortunately for me, I happened to stumble across a FWIS course titled “ENGI 120 – Introduction to Engineering Design”. I hurriedly signed up and soon enough, I was entirely captivated by the course taught by Dr. Hunter and Dr. Wettergreen of the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) at Rice. Though ENGI 120 required several hours of dedicated work outside of class, it easily became my favorite class and I knew I wanted to continue learning more. And so, here I am — participating in the Summer Experience in Engineering Design (SEED) 2019 cohort!
As part of my ENGI 120 course in Fall 2018, my team was tasked with creating a device to alert OEDK users of unsafe sound levels. Pictured above is one of our last iterations of the device.
SEED? 🌱
As part of SEED, I will be spending the rest of my summer working alongside 7 other Rice students, 6 students from Malawi, and 2 students from Tanzania to create an engineering design project focused on a real-world issue. I have already learned so much about our different cultures and I’m looking forward to learning even more in the coming weeks.
A Hectic First Week
My first week of SEED has been immensely busy and full of learning everyday from 8 am to 5 pm. It almost feels as though the days are passing me by faster than I can remember them. This is mostly attributed to the fact that we have condensed an entire semester’s worth of ENGI 120 down to one week-long boot camp. We also deconstructed an old Motorola DVR and a desktop monitor to help us better understand everything that goes into such devices that many of us tend to overlook in complexity. We’ve even made a couple of trips to the Houston Zoo for a scavenger hunt and a client interview. Right now we are taking all the information we have learned about the engineering design process and working on a mini project for the Zoo. To keep things short and sweet, Luna is an adult Red River Hog leaning towards the heavier side as she is usually found exclusively eating or sleeping. By early next week, we hope to have created an eating enrichment device to help her become more active during meal time.
Jellyfish at the Houston Zoo.
Anticipation for the Coming Weeks
Next week we find out which project we will be working on for the summer and I cannot wait! I am so eager to start tackling another real-world challenge. By the end of SEED, I hope to walk away with an even greater sense of self-confidence, the ability to enhance my communication skills on a team, and how to effectively contribute to a team dynamic. Of course, there is so much more that I hope to learn over the course of the summer, but these are just a few that I am looking forward to!
I look forward to sharing even more with you all as the summer goes along!
I hope you’re having fun Lexus! We all miss you at home. As always, you are doing something amazing. Be safe and we can’t wait til you make it back home!