I decided to attend UMD because I felt it provided a good balance of academic and social opportunities. UMD isn't good at just one thing; It excels in many different areas. For example, while it is a prestigious academic institution, it is also a D1 school. The diversity of opportunities at UMD is what appealed to me the most because I felt that I could do really anything that suited my interests.

 

My best experience with a class was in BIOE437: CAD in Bioengineering. I struggled a lot with this course because I had no experience with CAD. I got through it by going to office hours and seeking help from my peers. This class taught me how at the Clark School you aren't alone. There are so many friendly professors and students willing and open to helping you. BIOE437 culminated in a final project that I was, again, intimidated by at first. Working on this project, however, I realized how far I had come with CAD. In the end, it was cool to see how all my hard work and effort throughout the semester paid off. I was really proud of my final project and how much I had grown with CAD.

 

Favorite Class In Major
BIOE411: Tissue Engineering

 

HHUM205: Dancing in the World

 

Honors College (Honors Humanities)
Honors Ambassador
Black Engineers Society
Biomedical Engineering Society
Alpha Eta Mu Beta (Bioengineering Honors Society)
Tau Beta Pi (Engineering Honors Society)
AmazonNext Scholar

 

My favorite on-campus event are the basketball games!

 

Last spring, I studied abroad in Madrid, Spain. From Madrid, I went on a coordinated 4 day trip to South Morocco. The first day of this trip was spent in Marrakech where we were given a tour of the city and allowed to walk around. The following two days were spent traveling from Marrakech to the Sahara Desert. Along the way, we stopped at various sightseeing points including a village called Ait Ben Haddou where a lot of famous movies are filmed. Once in the Sahara Desert, we traveled on camels to a campsite. We got to watch the sunset over the desert and sand boarded across dunes. In the nighttime, a party was held at our campsite. The following morning, we rode on ATVs through the desert before heading back to the airport in Marrakech. I think going on this trip was the coolest thing I've ever done.

 

This summer, I interned at AstraZeneca (AZ). At AZ it was cool to see how so much of what I was learning in my bioengineering classes was taking place in industry. As a part of the internship, I worked on the Robotics and Automation team to develop an app in Python to automatically validate files containing sample information. I really enjoyed the software engineering process and learning more about the diversity of work done in a pharmaceutical company. I also really enjoyed learning about AZ's robotics lab and the steps the company is taking to move toward automation.