summer provides OPPORTUNITIES for engagement in local activities Brandon Seow: Engineering classes

A Taser alarm: It may sound slightly odd, but it’s what sophomore Brandon Seow spent six weeks of his summer on.

Following a weeklong family vacation to French Polynesia, Seow took two engineering classes in hopes of creating a portfolio before applying to the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science, or COSMOS, next summer. It was in his first class, a six-week course on engineering fundamentals at West Valley College, that he and his groupmates decided to create an alarm that stunned its user prior to going off.

The proposal was initially a joke, according to Seow. “It was right in the beginning (of the course) when we were supposed to shout out ideas to the group,” he said. “One of my peers shouted out ‘Taser alarm,’ which sounded funny at first, but somehow the teacher accepted it.”

During the class, Seow and his groupmates created a design, ordered the necessary parts — including electrode patches and wires to hook to phones — and then assembled the contraption. Though Seow’s work mainly involved writing code, he also aided with the physical engineering.

With limited supplies and an unavailable teammate, alongside a slew

Rishay Jain: Astrophysics internship

of bugs typical of an engineering project, Seow’s group faced its fair share of troubles. “We waited for a while longer than we should have to start building (the alarm) in real life — putting the parts together — because we had to do a lot of prior research,” he said. “Our project was one of the harder ones out of all the groups’.”

Still, the team was able to troubleshoot and ended up finishing on time. Beyond engineering skills, Seow also gained friendships from the course. “It’s fun because I get to meet students of all ages,” he said. “I have friends there who are in college, past college and going to be a junior (in high school) next year. So being able to talk with them and relate to them is nice.”

Overall, Seow appreciated the versatility of the class, which always kept him interested: From circuit building to coding Arduino, there was always something new to learn. “Every day is just a little different,” he said.

—Written by Amann Mahajan

Senior Rishay Jain’s work touched the stars at his Lockheed Martin internship this summer, where he studied solar flares: explosions of electromagnetic radiation or plasma from the sun that can travel up to 3,000 kilometers a second.

“If, by chance, this plume of material hits the Earth, and is able to penetrate Earth’s protective magnetic field, we could be severely impacted,” he wrote in an interview follow-up note. “Astronauts would be in extreme danger, air force/ military operations could be interrupted, and civilians could experience power and communications blackouts.”

Through working in the Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory at Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Technology Center, Jain is developing an application that helps scientists track solar flares and their evolution. His tool analyzes photos of the sun’s surface to detect where, when and how often flares occur, with the goal of predicting them more accurately.

Jain’s application builds on the work of previous Gunn interns at Lockheed Martin. They, like him, were part of the decadeslong joint program that sends a few rising seniors from Gunn to intern at the company during their junior- to senior-year summer. “While I’ve learned a lot of new concepts for my projects