perspective on grand challenges of engineering

FSE 150 Final Course Reflection

The FSE 150 course was very valuable to my engineering education and progress throughout the GCSP program. It provided me with a solid foundation of the type of thinking that goes into solving the Grand Challenges and helped prepare me to work on those challenges throughout my education and future.

The course was split up into an exploration of the four different themes: Health, Security, Joy of Living, and Sustainability. In each unit, I learned about the theme through activities, faculty guest lecturers, and student presentations. This allowed me to better explore each of the themes to gain an understanding of what type of work they involve. When I initially entered the GCSP program, I had the idea that I would be focusing solely on the theme of sustainability, and I would use my college experience to secure a job in the clean energy industry to accomplish my goal of helping reduce CO2 emissions. Although my theme is still sustainability and sustainable engineering topics like clean energy are most important to me, I have discovered through the course the important of the other themes.

One of the other themes that was most compelling to me was the health theme, which I decided to focus on for my Future Solutions project with my team. I originally decided to form a team with the idea of solving the problem of misleading and confusing medical information available through online websites, but I ended up working with my team on a future solutions project to diagnose melanoma using AI. This project was very different from my theme of sustainability, and I was initially hesitant about the project because it was so focused on health. Over the course of the semester, though, I came to realize the fundamental aspect of a project that makes it fulfilling is the feeling that the project can make a difference. By exploring the many societal impacts of our future solution, I saw what effects the project could have on society.

The Future Solutions project that I worked on with my team was titled “Accessible Melanoma Diagnosis through AI” and was created with the aim of solving the problem of late diagnosis of melanoma, which is easily treated if caught early on but deadly if detected too late. The proposed solution was a smartphone app which included a scanner portion through which a pretrained AI algorithm could take a picture of a mole and provide a diagnosis with a certainty level about whether the suspicious spot is melanoma.

Throughout the course of the project, my team and I identified a problem, a target customer, stakeholders, societal challenges and impacts, value creation, and enabling technologies for our proposed solution. This project was my favorite part of FSE 150 because it allowed me to exercise my creative and entrepreneurial mindset to work through developing a solution to a real-world problem. By doing background research on enabling technologies and coding a neural-network powered software using Python and OpenCV with my group, I learned about the basics of AI, which helped increase my interdisciplinary skill as a Mechanical Engineering student. After the poster session, I was inspired by faculty to continue the project with some of my group members during winter break to develop an actual app to provide a recommendation for melanoma. This project prepared me with the proper mindset to be able to implement a solution because it influenced me to consider the impacts of the technology. Because of this, when I work on the app during winter break, I will know what societal factors I will need to consider, such as legal, privacy, and funding challenges.

Another part of the course that was very valuable to me was the faculty lectures in each theme area. With faculty coming to present their research, I was able to get a better idea of what research looked like at a university and the types of challenges that they were facing. I was fascinated by the boundaries that were being expanded by the many research projects and the potential to make a real impact in the theme areas. This inspired me to get involved in research by reaching out to a faculty mentor and submitting a research stipend application to work on contributing a solution in the sustainability theme.

My main takeaway from this course, though, is the importance of making a solution that is effective in the real world. This requires more work, like background research on the customer and stakeholders and looking into the societal challenges and impacts. Once these are truly and fairly weighed, one finds that there are positive and negative impacts to every technology, no matter how small. No technology is perfect, but progress requires the benefits to outweigh the costs.

This course has led me to redefine my career interests to something broader and more interdisciplinary, made me more motivated than ever to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the GCSP program, and has solidified the importance of entrepreneurial mindset.