 Dances With
Engineers
It is early March and An Chi
(Danielle) Tsou '04 of Valatie, New York, is absorbed in the
problems of air pollution for her senior Engineering Design
Clinic. One day she's leading a design team working on a pilot
tool to assess and improve energy efficiency for GE Plastics buildings
and facilities in western Massachusetts. The next day she's
on a morning cross-country flight to the University of California
at Berkeley where she might want to study biomedical engineering.
Her final months at Smith, like
those of her classmates, orbit around completing coursework
and the senior design project, considering graduate schools and anticipating
summer travel plans. Although she recently learned that she
is the recipient of a prestigious National Science Foundation fellowship
to pursue graduate studies in engineering, Tsou is still
deciding whether to start working on a Ph.D. right away or defer graduate
school admission and travel for a year.
Growing up, Tsou thought she
would follow in the footsteps of her father, a physician,
but that changed when she realized she enjoyed problem solving
and design, "which
is really a good bulk of what engineers do," she says. "I have always
wanted to use my career to be able to directly help people and have always been
interested in the field of medicine…[Biomedical engineering] is a perfect
combination for me. I can use my work in engineering research and apply it to
the medical field."
That she could also take dance
classes while she studied engineering is a measure of how unique her
education at Smith has been. In addition to taking classes in modern
and Afro-Brazilian dance, she also found dance incorporated into a
continuum mechanics class taught by Glenn Ellis, Ford Motor Visiting
Professor of Engineering Education. "Professor Ellis has a unique way of teaching
his students," she recalls. "How often does a professor have all
his students dance and spin around the room in order to better learn concepts
like inertia and motion? It was so much fun!" |
