In normal times, Environmental Engineering senior Elieen R. Egolf ’21 would have conducted most of her thesis research at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences’ Active Learning Labs.
But with labs mostly closed due to the pandemic, she took an unusual approach to her research in an unusual location: she built a robot composter in the basement of her home in Colorado.
Sourcing food waste from a local composting facility, Egolf amassed about 89 gallons of material to test her invention and woke up at 6:00 a.m. every other day for six weeks to conduct testing.
On Friday, she and other SEAS seniors celebrated the completion of their undergraduate theses and senior capstone projects, the culmination of a year of research conducted in spite of the logistical hurdles of an unconventional, largely-remote semester at SEAS.
When Abigail S. Huebner â23 was deciding which concentration to declare in fall 2020, she was hesitant about declaring engineering without having ever taken an engineering course in person.
âI was confused about how I was going to sort of learn what engineering was and get a feel for engineering without having any in-person component, and without having the labs and hands-on experience that I know is usually so crucial to understanding engineering,â she said.
But since deciding to declare engineering as her concentration, Huebner said she has been âpleasantly surprisedâ by her experience in online engineering courses, though she acknowledged âthereâs still something missing.â