What brought you here to UPEI, and why did you choose to study Sustainable Design Engineering?

When I was planning to come to Canada (from home in Nigeria) for school I applied to UNB and UPEI and was accepted to both schools. When I reviewed the programs UPEI's was a sustainable design engineering program, and it seemed like a more interesting prospect and something I would be interested in doing. UPEI's engineering program is novel in the sense that it's a design-focused program where you get to do actual projects—that was a big factor.

What's interesting and unique about the clinic projects you work on each year? 

All the projects come really close to mimicking real-life situations. Sometimes things don't work out according to your plan, which is how things kind of play out in real life so you need to come up with solutions, counter-solutions, and other alternatives and think outside of the box. In some ways we have a typical classroom structure to study the theoretical aspects but the design program makes it less like a structured class because the projects we undertake just throw you in and anything can happen. You have to develop skills to communicate with the client, to communicate with your teammates, and pass your message across or your designs and things like that. So our projects are definitely challenging on all fronts—we're not just passing tests and submitting good assignments; we also have to be good at communicating, which you'll need in the real world. The clients are usually engineering firms who are busy with their own schedules, and we're coming in as a team trying to cooperate with them—it definitely forces you to up your communication game, and to make sure the client and the rest of the team are all on the same page with regards to the goals of the project.

Tell me about your fourth-year project, what are you working on today?

We're standing here in our project bay, and my current project involves the tow tank. We're working with Aspen Kemp and Associates as a clinic partner, performing resistance tests on model boat hulls. It helps ship designers figure out characteristics of the hull they're designing, to know how much horsepower would be needed for a full-size ship to travel at a certain speed. The goal of our project is to design a control system to automate the process and collect data from the sensors—it's a multi-year project with other teams working on different components. There's a team that designed the model hull we're testing, there's another team that designed the carriage and picked out the motor.

All the projects come really close to mimicking real-life situations. Sometimes things don't work out according to your plan, which is how things kind of play out in real life so you need to come up with solutions, counter-solutions, and other alternatives and think outside of the box.

What kinds of opportunities have you experienced as a UPEI Sustainable Design Engineering student?

The way the program is structured you get a lot of opportunities to develop your skills, and meet and work with other students developing the same skills as you're trying to develop, say computer-aided design, programming, project management, or technical-related skills. The program is great for close learning with professors, and we have comparatively small class sizes for an engineering program so we get good opportunities to work with professors and really pick their brains for whatever it is we're learning at the time. 

Read more about their 2022 team project with Aspin Kemp and Associates