It was quite a feeling to be up in front of everyone that I had met over the course of my two weeks in Paris, presenting my team’s medium fidelity cupholder for our power wheelchair user. As I was up there holding the cupholder, I got a chance to reflect a little on my time in Paris.
Here is a non-ordered list of everything that I managed to do in those short two weeks:
Visited 4 museums (Centre Pompidou, Arts et Metiers, Foundation Louis Vuitton, Science Museum)
Modeled a fashion piece featured on Vogue (Steven Passaro)
Ate 29 croissants, 10 baguettes, 8 macrons, 4 gelatos, and basically limitless sweets
Took a $100 flight to Prague for the weekend and visited my cousin
Photo bombed by the Google Maps car
Spent 24 straight hours at the 24 hours of Le Mans (famous car race)
Took photos at the Eiffel Tower twice
Interviewed and photographed by Rice (thanks Jeff and Brandon!)
Went down in the Catacombs
Visited a jazz club in a Parisian cellar
Picnicked with wine three times
Got in an (almost physical) altercation with an angry Parisian
Prototyped 4 iterations of a cupholder
And my personal favorite; spent 3 hours chiseling out a 5in x 1in slot in a wooden cup with a screwdriver
This is just what I can remember and I am pretty sure there are other things I did that didn’t make the list. I did so much that instead of doing a day by day recap, I will just share my thoughts on the second week and talk about my overall thoughts on the iSEED program. If you would like to sit down with me and talk (like the French love to, especially with wine) then you know where to find me: Brown College (look for the brown building on the Northernmost edge of campus, tucked behind all the trees and foliage J).
The second week was very heavy on the prototyping aspect that gives the class its names and I felt like I was itching for it. Starting on Monday we began to consolidate ideas and decided on a direction for our final design. We didn’t have much time to begin with since the program is so short, but this time felt especially short since we had to present on Friday. It became very stressful for me as a non-engineer trying to do some pretty design-y and engineer-y stuff in a short timeline and I had to learn techniques basically as I was doing them. I struggled a heavy amount in deciding on a direction to go on and how to actually build the vision I wanted. Thankfully, I had excellent teammates (shoutout Justine and Miguel) who were incredible.
Towards the middle of the week (Wednesday) I went on a shopping trip with Dr. Wettergreen that enlightened me significantly (kinda like the part in The Lego Movie where Emmet returns from the real world and can finally see like a master builder). As I walked around French Home Depot I felt just like Emmet looking around at the various items for sale and picturing fitting into the design I had envisioned. I know it sounds really strange, but for me it was such an enlightening experience to see all those seemingly random parts come together in my mind.
Armed with parts from the hardware store, the next two days went by in a flash as my team scrambled to finish our build out of the parts and not something that we had thought would be 3D printed. A highlight during this process was spending the whole early afternoon chiseling out a small rectangle in our cup to mount it to our bracket with a humble little hacksaw and screwdriver.
Beside the prototyping construction, I got to spend a lot of time in the city to finish exploring the sites I wanted to see. Two highlights stood out to me:
1. Visiting the fashion house of designer Steven Passaro with Rice. This was a spur of the moment activity with a Rice alum inviting us to visit the fashion house she worked for and I had an incredible time. I always feel like I learn the most from site visits since you can see how a company operates and talk with people that are doing things that I want to do one day. And getting to see a fashion house in the capital of fashion, Paris, just felt like such a special treat. I got to ask some business questions about operations and such that felt very enlightening to learn about.
2. I went down into the heart of Paris, the catacombs. Famous as an intricate series of tunnels that spawn most of Paris and home to over six million skeletons of former Parisians. Walking down the almost 1.5 kilometer section that is available for the public to see felt like a surreal moment for me. I was among a sea of bones that seemingly never ended and it felt very powerful for me. It was also an engineering wonder for how they stacked so many bones on top of each other for so long, must have taken ages….
Overall, my experience in Paris and in Europe was more than I could have ever expected and I feel eternally grateful for the opportunity. It was so enlightening to spend such a long time in Europe and really get to settle into a routine that almost made me feel like a native of the cities we visited. I think the best way to summarize my experience was that it felt like an espresso shot of studying abroad that allowed me to get a sweet taste of learning in a new country that I want to dive fully in and get an XL cappuccino with whipped cream (ie. Study abroad for a whole semester or more). Now, my journey continues to Dubai (where I write this post now), a city that is so vastly different from Paris it might as well be on Mars…