The College of Engineering Student Stories

Meet Andrew

I chose biomedical engineering because I've always had a knack for tinkering with things such as Legos or old components in the garage. It also feeds into my passion for engaging with others on a personal level while also feeling that the work I am doing is actually helping someone.

The best part about studying engineering at UTA is that you never feel alone. My favorite part is the people: the joy that you get from making friends and with those same friends, passing all of the grueling exams and quizzes and participating in projects such as drug delivery systems, TMJ Implant Prototyping, or participating in capstone where you are tasked with tackling a real-life, problem. In my case, that was a surgical smoke removal system.

My favorite class by far was Engineering Approaches to Solving Clinical Challenges taught by Dr. Jaworski. This was the first class that introduced me to working on various projects with different team members and being able to think outside the box to solve the problems, while still learning how to manage your time and meet deadlines.

I am the president of our National Society of Black Engineers chapter, and I have also served as secretary, conference planning chair and social chair. I got into NSBE because I knew I wanted to enhance my public speaking skills and confidence. The social chair role allowed me to learn how to talk to both underclassmen and upperclassmen. During my rise to presidency, there were various challenges that the officer board went through, and my job as president was to tackle some of those challenges, such as restructuring the board to ensure communication was on par, or learning how to talk to different companies to persuade them to donate to the organization so that we could take more people to conferences.

Thanks to Mrs. Coleman in the Kelcy Warren Career Experience Center, I landed my first internship at Fort Worth Diagnostics, a diagnostic company, that turned into a co-op, where I was able to get an understanding of the complete process from start to finish of developing an assay. Additionally, I was fortunate to be selected as an Alcon extern, which was a 3-day program that introduced me to the largest eye-care company in the world. This externship ended up turning into an internship for the next summer, where I worked on real-life projects that Alcon engineers were currently part of. As a side note, I was also selected as 1 of 50+ interns to take part in the Alcon Intern Spotlight Film.

I plan to pursue my MBA at UTA and climb up the ladder at a biotech company so that I can play a part in providing affordable healthcare to the world on a global scale and assist in developing innovation combining biotech and AI.