Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
So, I guess it’s a pop culture phenomenon. YOLO means You Only Live Once. So the way
I look at it, I try to take advantage of all of the opportunities that are available to
me. Ten years down the road if I thought about my time in college, what would I miss, um
having not done. Whenever something came up, I took the initiative to either apply for
it or just throw myself into it.
I was born in Taiwan, in Taipei, the capital city. So our whole family moved to the US
at—when I was six. So I stayed in Seattle Washington all through elementary school and
finished up middle school and high school in Taiwan. Jumping back and forth has um,
has been challenging but it also has given me the ability to throw myself in new situations
and adapt to it.
I was very interested in engineering so I looked at a lot of the top engineering schools
but it came down to, kind of the range of opportunities that Illinois offered. Um being
in the Midwest there’s a lot of great engineering companies around the Chicago area, around
you know St. Louis.
My passion for model airplanes started when I was taking the airplanes from you know,
going back and forth between Taiwan and Seattle. Um just you know the massive like size of
these jets and like the power that you feel when you’re like taking off.
So my freshman year I knew that I wanted to study abroad sometime during college um and
since I didn’t know what I was doing my freshman summer, I felt that was a great opportunity
to just go for it and um I went ahead and applied to a program in France, in Toulouse
France. I knew that that was where Airbus was headquartered um so I did a month of work
at Airbus as a assembly line operations intern so I worked on the interior assembly of their
A3-30 and A3-40 jets. I think having that experience under my belt really um set me
up for a successful college career.
What I like about mechanical engineering is that—the breadth and also the depth of the
subjects that we learn and I think it’s really benefitted me to know at least a little
bit about each subject area to put the whole picture together and think about um engineering
systems as a whole.
I first met Stan in 2011 when he transferred from aerospace engineering into mechanical
engineering, he joined my research group um shortly after that. Stan joined a project
where we’re studying silicon for solar cells. We’re interested in measuring stress in
the material. Uh the material is a silicon wafer and Stan helped us by designing a test
fixture that we could use to test these by bending them.
Engineering Council is an entirely student run organization so it oversees the 70-80
RSO’s, Registered Student Organizations. We act as the hub for them to bring us um
suggestions for improvement within the college, we act as the interface between the college
administrators and the students. So I was the director of Engineering Open House this
past year, of 2012. It’s a student run event where we see over 20,000 visitors a year from
high schools around Illinois and around the country. Um they bring their students and
we exhibit all of our work that we have been doing over the past year so all of the research
labs are open um and the student organizations all have different exhibits to teach the public
about what engineering is. You know, having over 350 exhibits, each one being unique,
having to have it’s own resources, dealing with a lot of issues that you don’t find
in the classroom, like I had to organize a press release, combined into a very challenging
task um as a student because I was balancing an 18-hour course load but it has done great
things to the way that I face challenges now.
The Knight of St. Patrick is an annual award. You are evaluated on your contributions to
the college of Engineering or to the University and you know your academic standing and different
things like that but they want to see how you give back to the college of Engineering.
Every year there is about 13 students that get picked so it was a huge honor. I guess
our responsibility was to actually play pranks. We uh saran-wrapped the sculpture on the Engineering
quad, we put eviction notices on a lot of the other colleges buildings saying that the
College of Engineering purchased their building and to call the Dean, we left his cell phone
number.
I think why… the reason why I was so involved was I saw the opportunity to make a difference.
What Illinois really does well is it gives you these opportunities.
So the Heft Technology and Management Program is a minor between the College of Engineering
and the College of Business.
What the Heft Technology and Management Program brings in addition to the curriculum is access
to this cohort experience where the 50 students come together from Business and Engineering
together.
As an engineer I had to take Accounting, Marketing, and Finance
The curriculum of the program involves a capstone project for our corporate partners. They work
back and forth with a final deliverable in May that the company takes and many times
these projects actually are implemented.
So my project was with uh Boeing um so that went back and filled into my whole aerospace
interest. It was very intriguing for me to see how different um and effective both of
the disciplines thought and did approach problems so um it really helped me in the workplace
during my internships.
I would say Illinois has been pivotal in shaping my career and what I see myself doing in the
future. The mindset that people have here at Illinois is that nothing…I would say
nothing is impossible. Being able to you know learn from my classmates, learn from my professors
about their career plans, about um what drives them has really shaped the person I am today.
Not just from my peers but I think the classes themselves have given me a wealth of knowledge
and a good you know, a skill set to bring that to my future uh career. I will be working
as a program manager on the Windows Ecosystem Engineering Team at Microsoft Corporation.
My name is Stan Chang and this is my Engineering at Illinois experience!