It’s hard to believe I have finished my first year at UC! I lived on campus as a part of the Engineering Living Learning Community (LLC), where I had the opportunity to meet several other people also studying engineering. It was beneficial to be surrounded by others in my major as well as similar majors because our shared experiences and classes encouraged us to help each other and work together to solve problems. Because of my time in the Engineering LLC, I am now part of a closely knit community of engineers who I call my friends.

      It was a bit challenging at first: getting acclimated to dorm life, meeting new people, sharing spaces with others, learning the most efficient routes to reach my classes on time, and, most importantly, learning how many days could I go before needing to do my laundry.

      Making the decision to be a part of this community is easily one of the best decisions I have made thus far. Meeting people from similar majors who took many of the same classes and were willing to help one another was an invaluable experience.

      I was also able to participate in intramural sports and continue volunteering in my community. I joined the Men’s Club Lacrosse team and played 7v7 soccer with some people from my floor. I was happy to be a part of this team because it helped me get to know the people from my floor even better and helped me stay active now that I wasn’t doing sports all the time like I did in high school. I appreciate that UC has a volunteer portal available to students because it made finding volunteer experiences easy.

      I also took part in an honors experience in the spring with four other people. We did research on how often different aspects of the engineering design process were used while playing the popular games Minecraft and Zelda, Tears of the Kingdom. We spent time researching the physics of the games to determine how applicable these games were to real life. We also spent time watching many videos of people playing these games and making note of how often they used engineering design principles. We presented our research at UC’s 2024 Undergraduate Scholarly Showcase. 

      The link to our presentation:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/15K3YpSOmvv0gmidWZ9-0MqI9W1Mn4aKG/view?usp=sharing

      Finally, I took part in UC’s innovation challenge during the spring semester. I did this with my roommate and two other people from our floor who were also roommates. We wanted to make a prototype of an autonomous robot that could navigate college campuses or other large, walkable communities and dispense salt onto sidewalks during the winter. This would hopefully improve the safety of these sidewalks and prevent people from slipping on patches of ice that form during the winter. We made a prototype and presented it to a panel of judges near the end of the semester.

      I feel like I have become a more open-minded individual over the past year. Meeting so many new people and forcing myself to open up and try new things has allowed me to learn so many new things. I was able to uphold my high academic standing and made the Dean’s List both semesters through determination and with the help of the individuals I met this year. My first year at UC has been very exciting, and my community has helped me to learn the importance of a work-life balance. I believe that the people I have met at UC this year are the most valuable resources that I could have. I will continue to use this network of individuals to grow in my academic career as well as in my social life.