During my time in the Dublin High School engineering program, I have met a number of industry professionals through workplace field trips and guest speakers that have introduced me to a variety of STEM fields. I have learned multiple skills in the work place through these experiences as well as expanded my horizon of interests in engineering fields. 

Mentorship Program

Field Trips 

During this field trip, my peers and I were able to tour the military base in our home town, Dublin. This experience was eye-opening as I never knew how many careers were offered in the army. We started the day by looking at the visitor center which depicted the entire history of the base. Then, we listened to presentations given by a variety of different teams at the base such as the army band. I was able to talk to LTC Chalas and invited her to be on my podcast, From Scratch. 

During our San Jose State/Santa Clara University field trip, my peers and I were given a tour of both universities and we learned more about the engineering departments. We started with the Santa Clara University where we learned more about the academic requirements for the university. As Santa Clara is a Jesuit school, they have a focus of giving back to the community and being a well-rounded person which is why they require eveey student to take a class learning about ethics and religions. At SJSU, we toured the campus and learned about other majors. I found it really interesting that SJSU has a pre-school on campus where students who are learning about child development can interact with the kids. While we were there, the SJSU club rush was also occuring, so during lunch, my peers and I explored the different clubs SJSU has to offer. 

During the field trip to the Mizuho OSI, I was able to learn more about biomedical engineering. My peers and I toured the facility and saw the multiple different products Mizuho OSI made such as a surgical table, as seen in the picture above. We were allowed to try out some of the devices such a body thermal scanner and lay on a surgical table. We saw the manufacturing side of product development as well as we were able to tour part of the warehouse. During lunch, we were able to network with some of the engineers and ask questions. 

During the field trip to the Patriot Jet Foundation field trip, I was able to learn more about aerodynamics. My peers and I had played an aviation trivia game where we learned about various aviation facts such as the who piloted the first supersonic flight, Charles Yeager. We also learned that the planes we saw had been used in the movie "Top Gun" as well as its sequel. We had the opportunity to sit in a plane as well as try out flight simulators. There was a guest presentation by the company Volansi who develop delivery drones for long distance deliveries, mainly operated through battery power. The aerospace engineering field had always sparked curiosity in me and this experienced allowed me to learn more about this field and its opportunities, especially in the growing field of drone usage. I hope to continue learning about aerospace engineering in the future. 

I attended the JA Tech and Innovation Summit in September of 2021 where I learned the various parts of machine learning. The presentation was given by Nisha Nadkarni, who works in Amazon Web Services, and Laura Salinas. They had talked about how machine learning was incorporated into daily life, such as the “For You” page in social media and applications like Google Translate. Multiple different demos were shown including a Language Processor where a program was used to determine if a word was used in a negative or positive contention based on the other words in the sentence, the use of computer vision where the computer uses mathematical data and the data from the camera to identify an object, and a demo on how the personalization page works. By listening to this presentation, I got more insight towards how daily computer machine technology works which had always been a curiosity of mine. The presenters recommended learning STEM related mathematics/statistics as well as learning how to code if I wanted to pursue a future in this field.  This presentation truly expanded my idea of what machine learning was and expanded my interest in this field as well. 

Influential Speakers