Hi! My name is Nick Discawicz and I am a senior-level student at the University of Connecticut and am pursuing a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and german studies with a minor in mathematics. I am currently in the Eurotech program that combines an Engineering major with a German major in a duel degree program. A significant aspect of this program is being able to spend a year abroad in Germany as part of a foreign exchange program. Between August 2021 and August 2022, I lived in Heidelberg, Germany, where I really enjoyed immersing myself into the German culture and I returned to the US directly before beginning my senior year at UConn.
One of the most significant career experiences in my life is my time working as a representative in sales and as a manager of a sales office. In the summer of 2021, I became a business owner for the first time and ran an office as a branch manager in Rutland, VT. This experience, on top of my broad educational background and experiences, has brought along a desire to work in a broad field of engineering, management, and sales. Therefore, in entering this class, I am pursuing an engineering position that utilizes aspects of business and management on top of the technical aspects that comes from engineering itself.
I was honestly quite nervous when entering this course. Beginning in around 2018 I had been dealing with various types of mental health issues around my university classes, and once COVID-19 caused a country-wide lockdown I had to switch to online learning. Owing to this change I decided to take a semester off from Engineering Studies. Afterwards, I began my year abroad in Germany, where I focused on German Studies rather than Engineering. I began this course after I returned. Due to these reasons, I hadn't studied Engineering in nearly two years before beginning this course. Due to the level of technical background involved in courses prior to this course, I was nervous that I wouldn't perform well due to rustiness in Engineering knowledge.
While I was very nervous, I was also very comfortable communicating these issues with my professors as well as classmates, and the community was more than supportive in helping me through this course. Throughout this course, I had gradually improved in my engineering and mathematics skills to the point where I could rather easily follow the while refreshing on knowledge from previous years. Although some topics were harder to understand than others, I feel I performed very well in this course and perhaps better than many other courses I've taken in chemical engineering. I feel that this will allow me to apply various aspects of chemical production in future endeavors, especially through developed knowledge of ASPEN programming and various unit operations thereof. I don't feel that I would've done anything differently while taking this course. I'm pretty satisfied with my performance and I hope my presented work in the learning outcomes of this course reflects that.