A Beacon of Engineering Anonymous

At my home, it sometimes feels like “angle of refraction”, “thin films”, and “escape velocity” are as common as “hello”, “thank you”, and “go to sleep”. That's what you get when your parents are both professors in engineering. When I ask a single question about the notes I took on the Bernoulli principle, my parents give me a lecture as if I were enrolled in their course

A large majority of my friends share an interest in computer science and programming, inspired from a young age by our close proximity to Microsoft’s headquarters. At school, it’s as if English was their second language, with their native tongue being binary. In short, it feels like science, technology, and the mathematics have become a quintessential part of my life today, despite my much greater passion for humanities and the social sciences.

When I secured my joint internship at the University of Washington’s business school and its “Sensors, Energy, and Automation Laboratory”, it was as if I had found the best of both worlds. I’ve been given the opportunity to not only draft commercialization plans and crowdfunding campaigns for new technology, but also to help with designing the medical drones and voice-recognition software themselves, for a plethora of...