About Me

I could be home in 12 minutes. My little Quaker high school, Carolina Friends, was one
mile from my house and just six away from Duke. I wanted to leave home for college but after
years of searching for a Duke not in Durham, I finally admitted my love for Duke and Bull City
and applied ED. At Duke my major, as of yet undeclared, is Mechanical Engineering. I just
applied for the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Certificate and am considering a math minor. I
have loved every STEM class I have taken, which made choosing a major difficult. I never
doubted my desire to study in Pratt, it was merely a question of which concentration. Eventually,
after building a drone in EGR 101, I realized I was happiest designing physical solutions to
problems and figuring out how to fabricate them, and ME best aligned with those interests.
I&E was an easy choice because when I researched the courses, so many questions I
had about the real world were listed as essential topics. I am taking these classes not just to get
a certificate but because with no GPAs, majors, or other structure they would still be at the top
of my list. Beneath all of the complications, I believe that the purpose of college is to learn
complicated and applicable topics both deeper and quicker than self-study would allow. The
textbooks we use in most classes are available online, sometimes for free, and a dedicated
individual could work through them on their own. However, the guidance of the professors and
the incubator of learning cause these classes to be more than the sum of their parts, and while
we are here we should take the classes that give us the tools we will need most in our lives. I
plan on using those tools to innovate in such a way that can truly change the world. The best
minds of our generation come out of college and waste their potential by trying to find ways to
get us to spend a couple more minutes a day on Facebook, to click more ads. I think we as a
country need a new race to the moon, some nationwide initiative to make a giant leap forward
and I think the push towards all-renewable energy could be just that. A convenient side-effect
would be saving our planet and the lives of future generations, which would definitely be a
positive.
In the future, I would love to lead a team of engineers. Regardless of the size of team, or
company context, I&E concepts will be applicable to maximizing the impact of my team. I am still
not sure exactly what my future will look like, but I know the skills learned between ME and I&E
will serve me well. Last summer I built a proof-of-concept application for a very early-stage local
startup looking to create a social media network for players in the North Carolina food economy,
and even within my limited role more training in the ambiguity of work in a young startup would
have made me a more effective intern.
I wish that more people asked me what music I am listening to. I love many different
kinds of music, from the gentlest acoustic to the most aggressive rap and I wish I could share
my favorite songs more often. I have however been asked what my favorite sport is many, many
times. My answer is rarely the same twice in row. I have played basketball, baseball, soccer,
ultimate frisbee, golf, tennis and football. The once constant was that during basketball season,
the answer was always basketball. My high school’s best sport was, strangely, ultimate: we won
the state championship five years in a row and won the southern regional tournament four times
yet won a single soccer game my junior season. My family has some serious sports divides: my
dad is a Red Sox and Duke fan, and my mom is a Yankees and UNC fan. I sided with my dad
on both, because everyone hates the Yankees. At Duke I play on the club ultimate team, and
intramural soccer, ultimate, basketball and flag football intramural teams.