Entrepreneurship
My entrepreneurship courses are MAE 434W and MAE 435 Product Design and Management I and II.
The first course has taught me engineering economics, project planning, costing and risk analysis, and product realization techniques which altogether equipped me and my team for creating the most effective agenda and scheduling for the implementation of our senior capstone project. The requirements of the class have allowed me to learn more and use the tools available for planning out a project, such as the use of Gantt charts and collaboration platforms. Great communication among team members was vital especially given that our agenda for timely completion of subtasks is packed with workload and that we are only able to meet virtually due to COVID-19 restrictions. Additionally, we were required to create written and oral presentations about updates of our project. Because the different project groups were required to share about each other's progress on their respective projects, all of us were able to see different types of scheduling tailored to the nature of the given project, which was interesting to see.
A screenshot taken from a weekly Zoom meeting of my senior design project team with our advisor Dr. Hao
Our work involves studying the influence of arterial wall geometries on blood flow, which is performed by analyzing the solid and fluid mechanics of viscous fluid along a viscoelastic thin-walled tube. The ultimate goal is to establish a comprehensive engineering rationale for the behavior of blood flow which would provide clinical indices for cardiovascular diseases such as atherosclerosis as currently, most of the information regarding these types of diseases are only based on statistics.
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To achieve this, we are performing extensive literature review, derivation of solid/fluid mechanics equations, calculations with blood and artery parameters, and programming using MATLAB to solve for the equations.
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A schematic diagram of a slice of an artery, denoting the internal forces due to its motion
The second course which I am currently taking is about producing the materials resulted from all of our work. The anticipated products of this two semester-long project include two conference papers that are to be submitted to the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference and the International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (as of now contains proprietary information, so related content/photos cannot be posted here). We are also drafting a journal article to Physical Review E, as well as creating a poster for a presentation at the undergraduate research symposium at ODU.
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Overall, this experience has been teaching me entrepreneurship skills in that it exposes me to the works behind addressing a problem through original design. I have learned how to recognize a gap in the existing pool of knowledge and understanding, as well as how to tackle this issue using the appropriate engineering approach. It is also giving me experience with turning a vision into results that are meant to contribute to society. This would be very helpful in my future career as an engineer as designing products go hand-in-hand with economics and identifying time and resource constraints.