Class Highlights

Close-up of a soundboard's dials.

INTO THE MIX

Senior Capstone Project: She is the Music Database Engineering can be used as a mechanism for social change, especially when students have the opportunity to implement their own ideas through senior capstone projects. Together, Ashley Wicks ’20, Laurel Haeger ’20, and Zaila Foster ’20 built a database to connect women in the music industry. Ashley, Laurel, and Zaila all recognize that women have been and continue to be underrepresented in the music industry. Furthermore, they emphasize that women of color are especially marginalized in this industry. The three teammates conjectured, “If we offer an easier way for women to be discovered and connected to projects in the music industry, representation of women might increase.” To address this problem, their engineering goal was to build a product to support a pipeline for both current and future generations of women in music—a product that is easily accessible by both the general public and professionals. The three women built a VOCL (Voices of Change Leaders) database, which allows users to search, sort, and filter in order to locate various female artists. The foundation provided by Tufts Engineering allowed the three seniors to construct a project that addressed a pertinent real-world issue.

EN-0001 Applications in Engineering: Engineering in Crises Interested in examining engineering ethics alongside engineering design processes? Engineering in Crises explores a different topic each term that it is offered. When Elana Chan ’21 took the course, it was “centered on case studies, such as the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and [the] 2010 Haiti earthquake and cholera outbreak, which made lectures super engaging.” Elana says that the course included multiple, hands-on projects. Her favorite was building a small-scale levee to test in the structures lab. “I learned so much about context-specific engineering and the role of engineering in public health throughout the semester,” she reflects. “This course solidified my decision to pursue engineering!” René LaPointe Jameson ’22 thinks that Engineering in Crises is a great example of Tufts Engineering as a whole: “I really enjoyed how collaborative [this class] was… Tufts Engineering is challenging, but not competitive amongst students. We engage with one another to learn and consider new ideas. I like to think the only competition that goes on is with yourself in an attempt to grow and do better.” Tackling real-world problems encourages students to think outside the box, and Tufts engineers engage in this kind of learning from day one. Introduction to Engineering courses, or “EN1,” are anything but surface-level—allowing for innovative thinking, collaboration, and real impact. Tufts engineers end their four years in the same way, through groundbreaking senior capstone projects. Explore a mix of unique courses below. —Kamille Bernard ’21

EN-0001 Applications in Engineering: Music and Art of Engineering Is audio engineering your forte? Many of the songs we all know and love use an immense amount of electrical diagnostics during production. This course allows students to gain a deeper understanding of the physics of sound, audio engineering, and electronic music synthesis. From pitch, tone, and distortion to amplification, sampling, and digital filtering, students in this course learn critical aspects of audio engineering, using MATLAB as a computational tool for engineering problems that are focused on the digital synthesis of sound. After taking the class, Kamar Godoy ’22 now feels “confident enough that if you wanted me to turn your laptop keyboard into a piano, saxophone, or even your own voice, I could do so.” One might think that music and engineering are entirely separate fields, but this class shows that the two can be in tune.

EN-0001 Applications in Engineering: Innovation in Biomedical Engineering The goal of biomedical engineering is to utilize big picture themes to gain insight into the current state of technology and its relationship to the future of human health and well-being. In this course, all students work together in teams to challenge the limitations of technology and project future technological opportunities. Ishan Ahuja ’23 describes his final project, in which the task was to create a new piece of technology that would solve a problem in the biomedical field: “While our project had to be grounded in current scientific research, we were encouraged to think outside the box, as well as be creative in our presentation medium. My group and I decided on a self-sufficient insulin patch, which would produce insulin through photosynthesis and deliver directly through its interface with the body. But we were perplexed—how would we explain this already far-reaching project with an even more ambitious medium? Then one night, it came to us... a rap. By the end, we had not only learned a lot about insulin production and delivery and the vast future possibilities in the field of biomedical engineering, but we’d produced a fire rap song.”