Good day all,
I
am a Midwest girl drawn out east to attempt a PhD in
agricultural and biological engineering with the goal of teaching
engineering. Originally
raised in Minnesota, I fell in love with chemistry at a young age and
later became acquainted with bioenergy systems from my Father who works
in the field. Upon graduation
from high school, I decided to pursue engineering to work in the
bioenergy
industry.
I spent my studies in rural Atchison, Kansas at Benedictine
College working towards degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering. Two
months in to my first semester I was asked to tutor a fellow engineer in
chemistry. From that one request, I became a fixed engineering tutor for the
rest of my studies and loved every minute of it….. even the ones spent helping
my peers understand distillation columns at 1:00 am.
Engineering is a beautiful field because it takes the elegant
complex workings of the natural world and applies them to solve problems. By my
final semester last spring, I had found that helping someone else understand
the beauty I had spent four years studying was even better than engineering
work itself.
Thus, I arrived at Penn State to take the next steps towards
becoming a professor and switched to ag and bio engineering to spend my
research time on a system called anaerobic digestion (my
favorite renewable energy technology). I am taking AEE 530 to start gathering
up and practice skills I will need to effectively facilitate learning.
I look forward to working with all of you as we go through
the semester to become better teachers in our varied disciplines.
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