Engineering Personal Statement

During my time at UCLA, engineering has increasingly become a bigger part of my life. When I first came to UCLA, while I was committed to the path of engineering, I did not know what exactly to expect or how I could fit in. Since then, every year I have grown both as an engineer and as a person. My first year, I learned how to navigate the new experiences of college, learning to manage my time adjusting to the quarter system, how to live away from home. I joined some clubs where I first really learned about what being an engineer was, through getting to know upper classmen and starting to get some hand-on experiences. My second year, I grew as person, balancing academics, club activities and having time for fun. I started taking upper division

I became more involved in clubs, starting to gain some leadership positions and experience, as well as more hands-on experience in a variety of areas of engineering.

Now, in my third year at UCLA, I thrive in the field of engineering. Academically, my upper division classes are harder but more interesting. The subject matter continues to be interesting. However, my involvement in clubs and organization is what mostly connects me to being an engineer. On the technical side, I am a continuing member of ELFIN (Electron Losses and Fields Investigation), which is which has as its mission designing and producing a CubeSat for launch in 2016. There I have learned technical skills, including how to model and simulate thermal conditions in Thermal Desktop, an AutoCAD program, as well as strengthening my analytical and problem solving skills. For this project, teamwork is essential and it provides nearly daily experience with working with in an extensive organization. On the professional side, I am on the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) executive board as the Evening with Industry Internal Co-Chair. This year I am in charge of planning Evening with Industry

I worked as a process engineering intern in the R&D department. I worked on hands-on, independent silicon chemistry work at lab and manufacturing scale for their skin care applications of emulsions and a dispersed crosslinked elastomer gel, scaling up related processes. I also conducted problem solving, stability and process improvement studies on color degradation of the emulsions. I learned to optimize reproducibility, lower waste, scale up processes, decrease process and touch time of emulsion and gel processes and other process engineering concepts and techniques. I operated a trishaft mixer, a Brookfield viscometer, a centrifuge and other lab equipment. Since this was all my own work, I completed the whole process from designing my experiments with process engineers to analyzing data with Minitab, a Design of Experiment software. I worked with cross-functional teams including technicians, engineers, chemists and technologists from R&D, Manufacturing and Quality Departments. In the end, I presented my findings to a cross-departmental audience and wrote an official