CAMILLE SAIDNAWEY
’17
MECHANICAL ENGINEER FROM BELMONT, MA
14
which makes it easy to constantly make new friends from varied backgrounds and world perspectives. It gives me adrenaline to keep a busy but varied lifestyle at school. My life is now fueled by coffee, which was sparked by interning at Keurig Green Mountain on the Puncture Mechanism team last summer. The company culture mirrors my own morals on sustainability and disruptive technology. I took on an independent project, which I was prepared for through my classes and by being exposed to the Tufts environment. From my experience, the Tufts community is very receptive and supportive to those who are willing to actively engage. Just by operating in a technical setting, communicating with peers and professors, being proactive in working through challenges, and managing my responsibilities, I have found how effectively the community facilitates learning. It keeps me intellectually stimulated and continually motivated to work hard and keep making the Tufts community just a little bit stronger.
PHOTO BY KATHLEEN DOOHER
The most basic definition of mechanical engineering is creating, understanding, and improving how physical systems work. This theme runs through all of my interests, especially when considering transportation systems. I could talk for hours about how transportation spans social and economic boundaries to make people’s lives easier, and right now we are on the brink of a rapid revolution regarding how people get around. Autonomous and electric cars will be the next innovation that reshapes our culture in the same way the iPhone wowed us ten years ago. The engineer in me is ready to jump into the industry as I’m itching to help fix the systemic problems like infrastructure failings and climate change in order to hopefully help the world. When sitting in my controls systems office hours every week, the conversation with my professor and other students quickly turns to self-driving cars and how the weather will affect a driver’s safety. As we work through many bags of chips and our homework assignments, we discuss the engineering ethics around such important innovations. I live for those conversations that challenge small talk and dive into people’s interests, and luckily, they happen all the time at Tufts. Sometimes they are intensely serious, but most of the time they are comical, sarcastic, and very imaginative. The school culture is friendly, approachable, and casually brilliant,