Welcome to Mechanical Engineering. I'm Dr. Sam Daniels. It's my pleasure to talk to you today. Our leadership team and Dr. Rob Gore Thaller, our Chair, and Dr. Carl Barrett, our Program Coordinator are there. I'll leave their information up at the end of the presentation. But hello, welcome. That's me!
So I want to talk about two things. One of the three reasons why I think BSME at the University of New Haven is a good choice. And the second one is just share some very quick experiences that some of our students have had here. One, one of the first-- one of the reasons I think of the three is the multi-prong education. And by multi-prong, I mean, there are different elements to our, our courses and our experiences that we share with the students here that are very valuable. And I think the experimental hands-on activities is a big one, we have maker spaces, our second maker space is going in right now.
We've got a shop for fabrication, fabricating projects. We do a lot of experimentation in our classes and specific experimentation classes. So we do emphasize some hands-on an experimental work. And that's critical to actually go through the process of fabricating something. We do emphasize also computational, the computational work is the Computer Aided Engineering FEA. I'm the local CAE guru at the university.
And to involve-- I teach the students how to do some more computer engineering, or CAD work, whatever is required, but most of our students come in with some good CAD background. So they're pretty good at modeling. The modeling, of course, and the FEA analysis or the Computer Aided Engineering part of it is, is only good if you have a really good idea about what your model is going to look like. And that means doing some analytic or theoretical calculations for your design first, so you don't lose on any of those three areas, we try and balance it out so you understand some of the limitations.
And then something we've been adding lately is the entrepreneurial mindset and innovation, the idea that the company needs and the customer needs are something to keep in mind. The customer may not like something you develop, because it's too expensive, it's too big, it's too heavy. So always keep in mind what the customer wants. And that will definitely influence the entire development of your of your engineering products. Throughout all of this, though, there's also communication [and] collaboration among their teams, and some open, you know, open-ended creativity for your different agile project activities that is all part of this. So that's the first one.
The second reason is, we're a pretty close-knit community. Faculty work a lot with our students. We tend to mentor more than other universities because we do a lot of project work and modeling, and therefore students have to ask for help and talk to us so the class sizes are small, but that's a bonus. Most of the faculty spend most of their time working with students, helping them develop skills and learn how to how to build or fabricate or model or analyze something. As you know, and you've been told we're student-centered. And we do a lot more than lectures, but we do not emphasize TAs. There are no TAs in our classes. We may have some students that open up the lab or the shop or the MakerSpace or they may run the laser cutter, the 3D printer but they're not helping with your classwork and with your calculations and homework. They're not teaching classes.
So and even with us, for us faculty, many of the times we do less than lectures. We actually emphasize more project activities. Some faculty have jumped over to projects instead of final exams. And I think it's much more valuable for people to experience project activity. As part of the close-knit community, you can also choose to be part of our Living Learning Community. That is, you can live in a dorm with other engineers, which is a great experience. I did it myself loved it when I was an undergraduate or you could even think about Prato not listed here, but you can even think about going to Italy for a semester and living with other engineering students that are in Italy and get that feel of living outside the country for a little bit. The second reason was the close-knit community.
The third reason is that there are a lot of unique experiences that you can have. And these are some of them. The senior design projects, which are quite extensive. They are going to end up being very big expensive projects, and they go right into production development for the company, so it's quite a change, quite a change to go from classroom to dealing with companies directly as a senior and an invaluable work experience too, for the senior projects. We do have internships, so you do have to get some experience in industry first before you graduate and that's either at the end of your sophomore or junior year. There are some skill sets that that we build into the first couple of years of the program that allow you to be more employable for the internship so we have that covered.
We also have a lot of experience with alumni companies, fabrication companies, local industries, we go on tours. Last semester, we went on an interesting tour at APS Technologies, which does drilling rigs for the oil and gas industry or we brought in as a speaker from Tesla Motor Company to talk about what a day in the life of an engineer at Tesla, that was a great talk. That was a lot of fun. The national competitions you can participate in Race to Zero, MIT Clean Energy, Supermileage. This year -- and they vary depending on what's offered and who's participating -- this year, the big thing is the National Wind competition, which is huge. And we've got a team competing in that. We're one of the few universities in the country that are that have been awarded the the National Wind Competition seat to participate in Colorado this summer. Hopefully, the students will be able to do that. Or even service learning the equivalent to the Engineers Without Borders program for us mechanicals. One of our faculty is setting something up in India this year.
So those are the three different kinds of experiences that I think are of the different pieces that I think make it make it a great education. And then here are some examples of why student experiences at the university can be so exciting and fun and something to talk about in the future for jobs and might even lead to jobs. So these are a couple of quick snippets of projects that our students did. Tri-Sol, it's a skylight project with the Department of Energy Project. Our faculty get grants and what do they do? They hire undergrad students to help with with the grants and they fabricate all the equipment that they need. So this one was great, a big project for skylights that would go inside of a skylight to collect solar energy and thermal energy.
Or the pizza box project that was a class project to keep pizzas hot for an hour ended up becoming a huge sensation and had gotten national attention. And then, a few years later, Pizza Hut, someone mentioned all of the media materials and Pizza Hut calls us and says, "Hey, send some people over let's talk to you about doing a feasibility study. Maybe we can use this?" And so that was an enormously great experience for our students.
More of the Net Zero competition where students set up a nice team of students, multidisciplinary, and they designed a family home for a disabled veteran. And our team ended up as a finalist in the competition out in Denver, Colorado last year. So that was a great experience for them. We're doing Wind this year, it was Race to Zero last year. And then last year, we also finished up a big project with the Department of Energy. And again, students this was involving more graduate students, but there were undergrads as well. This was a huge project, studying air conditioning systems on different buildings. And students did the entire thing. Undergrads, grad students, all the instrumentation, sensors, networking, the wireless communication systems, the analysis, even interacting with local companies and contractors conducting surveys finding out what was going on.
It was a great experience. It was one very memorable. The young lady on the right Amanda, she came to us actually from a community college was a Coast Guard veteran. And in the process of going through this project, she ran into electric boat managers, they loved talking to her and convinced her to come in and apply for a job and they offered her a full-time job and she got her dream job. She's from the Coast Guard, was from the Coast Guard so you know, naval systems was one of her big passions and she ends up getting a job working on submarines. So a great story for Amanda. Lovely add-on for that.
Shawn here. Shawn ended up one of our top students actually did his internships at Sikorsky, Lockheed Martin now. And 4.0 student ended up could have gone to MIT, Stanford, any place he wanted to, stayed with us for his Master's degree and ended up working on energy systems with one of our faculty members and starting his own company. So he started his own consulting firm. He was actually one of the students that participated in the clean energy prize and was one of the semi-finalists again. So a great experience for Shawn.
And all of these students ended up either moving on to grad school like the ones in the bottom right. Very well-known, many of them are probably ones that you've heard about, or going on to great companies that you can see here. Here's a small, not complete list of the companies our graduates go to, just in the last couple of years. For instance, SpaceX, we now have one of our students from a couple of years back, he's now working at SpaceX. He's actually on our Alumni Advisory Board. So it's great talking to him.
So a great program, lots of opportunities, lots of choices, lots of industries, you can go to. Let me get through this very quickly. These are just the jobs I went out just to see what kind of jobs I could find for mechanicals. And I found too many to list-- too many to list jobs. So it's a great choice for Mechanical Engineering. I think our program is a good one. And it could be a good choice for you to choose us. So thank you for your time. If you'd like to learn more about us, you can contact us directly. I'll open the slide in a second. But you can also learn more about Mechanical Engineering to help guide your career forward through the professional society, asme.org as well. So thank you, and good sharing my thoughts with you today.