Jade Greenberg (she/her) is a Spring 2024 graduate of GW and the UHP. She graduated with a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a minor in Biology. During her last semester at GW, we asked Jade to reflect on her time as SEAS student within the UHP, provide details on her senior capstone design project, and discuss the full-time work she had begun in New York. Read on to learn more about Jade’s time at GW and how the Honors Program enriched her experience here and beyond!
What was your experience like as a SEAS student within the Honors Program? How do you feel the Honors curriculum interacted with what you were learning through your engineering program?
Being in the Honors Program as a SEAS student is difficult, I won’t lie – not because of the course content but because of the course load. UHP SEAS students need to complete about six additional courses to fulfill program requirements; with only five open humanities and social sciences slots built into the SEAS curriculum, one semester will have an extra course in addition to the five or six that SEAS students already take each semester, including during senior year. What’s more, any AP or IB humanities credits students may have hoped would lighten the load will make no difference to the graduation timeline. And if you planned to take on a minor? Forget it unless you’re prepared to enroll in summer school.
Quick caveat: I did all these things, against my better judgment. I majored in mechanical engineering. I minored in biology. I was a member of the University Honors Program. Due to some health and scheduling difficulties, I am also graduating a year late, even with two summer
semesters under my belt. So please heed me when I say that, while it is possible, the path to the finish line is a highway, and you must be your own advocate regarding course scheduling, because mistakes can land you in some tight spots; I would know.
But I suppose that when it comes down to it, I would do it again, because I’m not sure what kind of person I would have become without being exposed to the material covered by the honors classes. I can’t imagine my inner life without, for example, having read Zhuangzi in freshman year as part of Origins, or without having studied cripistemology in Disability in the Arts.
The latter has become inextricable from my identity as an engineer. Roughly speaking, “cripistimology,” a portmanteau of “crip” and “epistemology,” concerns the lived experience of people with disabilities. One facet of this is accessibility. While I was not unfamiliar with this and other related concepts prior to taking the class (especially since I am disabled myself and have disabled friends and family), I became better equipped to recognize, speak to, and address accessibility – whether it was effective, ineffective, or entirely absent – in all parts of my life. I was able to use what I learned to help several classmates…and myself. Now, everywhere I look, I see opportunities for better designs, ways I can make society more inclusive, ways I can learn more from others and address my own biases. I truly believe this has made me a better, more socially responsible engineer, more able to use the power of my education and subsequent socioeconomic position to improve my community.
In summary, the honors curriculum gave me the chance to grow holistically. The courses provided a level of challenge that forced me to become a better writer, literary analyst, philosopher, and overall critical thinker – all scholarly aspects of myself I fear would have stagnated, if not atrophied, in a SEAS vacuum. I feel my education would have been incomplete without the UHP curriculum. To those who are considering a dual SEAS and UHP enrollment, with or without a minor, I say: do it, because you might read something that will change your life. But make sure you know what you’re getting into.
Tell us about the research you have been completing for your senior capstone design project. How has this process been?
My capstone involves converting a standard bike into an ebike using a kit while documenting what I learn in the process – which has been a challenge for me, because I started out knowing nothing about bikes aside from how to ride one. If the objective of a second- semester capstone project is to get hands-on experience with physically realized mechanical systems, a bicycle is a fitting subject to work with, comprising multiple machine elements in the drivetrain, wheels, frameset, and brakes. Since ebike conversion requires partial disassembly and reassembly of these subsystems, one becomes rather familiar with not only how they operate at a component level but also with the details of those components themselves and how to work with them.
For one thing, bicycle parts tend to require highly specific tools to remove; crank pullers and freewheel turners, for example, are only used on bikes. Subtypes of bike components require even more specific tools; crank pullers alone have three basic variations compatible with three different styles of crankset. To add yet another layer of complexity, proprietary designs of those components and component subtypes require correspondingly proprietary models of tools – i.e., a Shimano cassette requires a Shimano lockring remover.
The tools themselves must also be used in a certain way to achieve proper mechanical advantage, although these methods are simply best practice when working with hand tools in general. That trying to turn a wrench to unscrew a nut or bolt is easier done by holding the tool close to the body may be common knowledge, but I didn’t realize that holding the handles of two tools turning in opposing directions closer together made as much of a difference as it does, to the extent of turning crank bolt removal from impossible for someone of my stature to a simple affair. Knowing how to use your tools right is also a matter of personal safety, as proper ergonomics leads to better control of the forces at play and reduces the likelihood of bodily strain and sudden and/or projectile motion. Finer motor control with tools also means better assembled system performance; in reality, bike mechanics often rely on their sense of exerted forces, called “perceived torque,” which improves with experience, rather than constantly measuring every turn of the wrench. As another example of the idiosyncrasies of bike components, different manufacturers have different recommended torque values for screwing down bolts to avoid overtensioning, which can contribute to premature mechanical failure. These are details one would not know without hands-on experience but that are major aspects of designing for practical use and assembly. I learned all of this before even getting to the “e” parts of the “ebike conversion.”
I could speak much further about that, but my main takeaway from converting the bike to an ebike is that I would not recommend doing so unless you already have a bike and are not willing to build an ebike from scratch by purchasing individual components. Bikes, like all purpose-built systems, are designed to perform optimally as what they are, not as skeletons for something else. Put another way: the components of a bike are chosen with the understanding they will operate under certain cycles of stress and strain – ones a human will exert on the bike as a rider, plus a factor of safety. When that same bike with largely the same components is motorized, the operating conditions may now exceed those accounted for in the original design. So, a bike that works just fine as a bike may break as an ebike, or at least degrade exponentially faster; when you’re traveling at speed, this can be dangerous.
Certainly, doing this to an existing bike may be worth it to save money; in practice, a converted ebike that does not edge into motorcycle territory can last for a long time, if properly maintained. But as an engineer who now knows a bit more about bikes, I would choose to select the components myself and build an ebike from scratch. Not only can this be cheaper, but it also allows customization of the machine for my specific use-case, such as biking to work.
Overall, my capstone project has given me valuable experience in learning a relatively complex mechanical system from scratch through hands-on independent research, which I’ve found to be an educational microcosm of the work I do now as a field engineer.
What work are you now doing in New York? How has the experience been transitioning to a full-time job after college?
I prefer CAD (computer aided design) and engineering design work, but I was advised many times over to start my career in the field rather than go straight to R&D because some things can only be learned from experience. Having learned this lesson from my capstone project
quite thoroughly, when the construction company I interned with last summer offered me a job, I said yes.
Now, I work as a field engineer (FE) on the construction of the Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE) US-end converter station in Astoria, Queens. Part of New York’s plan to run on 70% renewable energy by 2030, the CHPE is an underground, 339-mile long high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line bringing hydroelectric power generated in Quebec to the New York metro area. The converter station specifically is a first-of-its-kind, grid-scale conversion of a former fossil fuel site to a zero-emission clean energy facility designed to transform the incoming DC power into outlet-compatible AC power. Those 1,250 megawatts will then flow into the NYC grid to power over one million homes, reducing emissions at a magnitude equivalent to taking 44% of cars off NYC streets. My entire reason for being an engineer has been to work on environmentalist projects like this one; I’m incredibly lucky to be working on something I care about so much right after graduating. It’s very fulfilling.
The day-to-day “living the dream” is much more routine – though I always knew it would be, and I don’t mind at all. Though my hours are long (I wake up at 5:00 am and get home around 4:30-5:00 pm), work is much easier for me than school, since I only have to focus on one “subject” at once. Possibly due to my unique background in mechanical engineering – as opposed to civil – my assigned scope of work covers all things heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC). Air-handling units (AHUs), refrigerant piping, duct and duct accessories, supports, and seismic restraints – as an FE, unlike in school, my role is not to design them but to supervise and coordinate their installation. This means dealing with the constructability and execution of the design.
Typically, an FE would be in an office off-site a year or more in advance of their part of the project being built. That entire time would be spent on just planning the operation with the project team and their scope-specific superintendent. Tasks to that end include procurement, writing work plans, hiring craft, reserving equipment, understanding the site, specs, and contract drawings inside and out, sending and processing requests for information (RFIs), redlining, doing takeoffs, scheduling, coordinating with other disciplines, and more. Then, when it comes time for their part to be built, the FE moves to a field office to execute their and their superintendent’s plan, checking quality and tracking quantities and dealing with any issues that arise when reality comes into play. However, because HVAC on this project is not self-performed and instead subbed out at multiple levels, my company decided a new hire like me could be assigned as operation FE just before field work began.
I spend one half of my day in the field and the other half in a temporary on-site office, doing many of the tasks I previously mentioned an FE is responsible for as the projects evolves over time, but mostly supervising execution of a work plan devised and more closely managed by a subcontractor…that manages another subcontractor, that manages another subcontractor. I still do everything field work entails and interact with staff and craft at all levels, but as the FE representing the company at the highest level of management, I must respect the chain of command and avoid overstepping by communicating concerns through the proper channels before taking immediate action to handle them myself. While occasionally bureaucratic, this degree of separation offers frequent opportunities to learn from other professionals by observation, smoothing my transition into my role as a new hire and recent graduate.
Going from the abstractions of academia to the concrete world of construction has been a valuable learning experience. Calling forty-plus hardware stores to procure a nonstandard size and type of stainless-steel threaded rod to solve a last-minute procurement issue teaches you things about manufacturing – and persistence…and hold music – that you won’t find in a textbook. Operating a man lift at 80 feet in the air to reach the top of an unfinished building – for your first time driving one ever – will test how much faith you have in yourself and your own judgment and capabilities.
As an engineer, you are often called upon to make decisions you must be able to justify and prove with your own knowledge and calculations; decisions you must be willing to stake your name on because they can have very real, serious, irreversible consequences for many people. When the work you do as an engineer can change lives, for better or for worse, caring about every detail is exhausting but essential. Both my company training as an FE and SEAS’ constant emphasis on engineering ethics has taught me to be wary of complacency, and I take pride in maintaining my sense of stewardship. So, even if construction isn’t exactly what I want to do forever, I feel like I am building a solid foundation for myself as a professional in my chosen field, and that’s enough for me right now.
