I chose to attend the University of Maryland for its incredible Fire Protection Engineering program, one of the best in the country! But beyond the exceptional academics, the proximity to my hometown and major professional regions, such as Washington, D.C. and Northern Virginia, made it an ideal location. Finally, UMD offers an exceptional balance for a large school with a small fire protection community. The resources, clubs, and athletics of a large university, paired with the close-knit community, small class sizes, and genuine networking opportunities within the Fire Protection Engineering program, made this decision effortless.

 

While unrelated to engineering, my favorite class I've taken at UMD was EDSP311: Peer Mentor Training and Certification. As a part of this class, I became a peer mentor for the TerpsEXCEED students, accompanying them to classes, extracurricular activities, and even just grabbing lunch together. While this class provided the gen eds needed to graduate, it more importantly exposed me to a previously unknown community at UMD, and taught me important life skills I will bring to my future endeavors. I became close friends with the students in the program, and even experienced many new activities by tagging along to their everyday schedule.

 

ENFP250: Introduction to Life Safety Analysis

 

EDSP311: Peer Mentor Training and Certification

 

Maryland Cheerleading
Society of Fire Protection Engineers

 

Women's basketball games!

 

During my freshman spring semester, I joined an undergraduate research project where we helped design a fire suppression system that eventually would be integrated into a completely autonomous wildfire suppression detector and suppressor system. My favorite experience was going to the Maryland Fire and Rescue Institute (MFRI) to test various suppression systems created by our team. This experience collaborating with a group of students to create a suppression system, but also testing and learning from that data, allowed the team to grow and improve our project.

 

In ENES102: Mechanics I, we covered some fundamental topics such as stress, strain, and failure. For our final project, we created a wooden truss built in the on-campus woodshop. We calculated the estimated failure stress with our class knowledge, and finally tested our truss's performance on the last day of class. Our team was one of the highest performing teams, and it was awesome to see wood collapse and explode!