Buenas Dias! I’m Alice Owens, a rising sophomore at Baker College, Rice University. I plan to major in Mechanical Engineering and also aim to pursue minors in Business and Engineering Design. In my free time, I love to bake and cook as well as hang out with friends. I am also very competitive and love to play sports – I play on Torque, the Rice Women’s Ultimate Frisbee team and actually came to Costa Rica from Milwaukee where we played in the national college championships for the second time this year. I also swim, play powderpuff and play basketball. I work as a lifeguard so chances are, if you can’t find me around Baker, I’ll be at the rec, either working, or working out.
In college, I was a member of the Engineering Academy where we worked on a variety of Engineering Design projects, my favourite of which was the design and prototyping of a ‘Lunar Rover’. We were tasked with creating a collapsible and compact electric vehicle which could be taken up to the moon and utilised by astronauts in their collection of samples. We were given a set of strict constraints including weight, dimensions and capacity which challenged us to really think outside the box to meet our design criteria.
Last year I baked a wedding cake and I am very proud of how it turned out. I was also very surprised by how much the construction process resembled that of an engineering design project which showed me how common engineering is in our daily lives.
Rather than having one specific idea for something I would like to create in the future, or a problem I would like to solve, I have a vision to innovate and create devices that have a lasting impact. Whether this is in the medical field, in conservation or in any other engineering field, I desire to create something that will benefit people in some area of their life.
With this in mind, I joined the iSEED program to Costa Rica with the hope that it will provide me with further design experience in a field in which I have no prior experience. I hope to better understand how engineering can be applied to real-world medical problems and how we can both identify these needs and design a solution to meet them. I am also very excited to explore another culture and experience living in a very different environment to the one I am familiar with.
– Alice 🙂