Education

1. California State University,Long Beach
2. Coventry University, Erasmus
3. Return to CSULB and Graduation
4. Long Beach Community College

CSULB was a strange time for me for many reasons aside from the obvious transition from high school and onward, for which I felt remarkably well prepared and adept for provided my history of rapid transitions in life and scenery. At first, College was exciting as I explored the new freedoms and resources that come with higher education. But this enthusiasm was short lived before I began to see the university as mediocre as far as it’s student life was concerned. As such, my time in undergraduate studies were spent largely in studious isolation. Being a commuter school, not many who were on campus were there because they wanted to be there, and I would quickly come to realize the regular schedule of most students was to go to class, and immediately go home without much care for networking or socializing. While this was not par for everyone in CSULB, this was unfortunately the environment in which I was surrounded by every day in mechanical engineering. I cannot deny that this allowed me to focus my time more on personal projects, I do still regret not spending more of that time outside of my discipline and socializing with more outgoing people from other majors. Before long, depression set in and I was forced to fight my way through it in solitude in an environment where I felt unable to seek help for nearly 4 years.

COVID-19 was a vital time of reflection. I distinctly recall the realization that in the transition from in person to an entirely online schooling schedule, my level of socialization remained almost entirely unchanged. Indicative of this is the fact that, in retrospect, I would sometimes spend weeks at a time without speaking a word to another person. As such, I decided to change this as aggressively as possible by studying the skill like it were it’s own academic subject matter. by the time anything had begun opening again up in the United States and quarantine regulations began to relax, I’d become comfortable with building communities of other engineering students in Discord servers and organizing study groups and gaming sessions. In a more professional sense, I’d become comfortable with reaching out with cold emails and organizing productive networking forums. While this practice is certainly looked down upon by some who believe that academia should be a pursuit of the individual, this breakout period into collectivizing entire classes of engineering students taught me some of my more functional networking skills and techniques that I would carry with me both across classes and across life in general.  

I think it would be no hyperbole as to say that studying abroad was something that I was both completely emotionally unprepared for, yet also needed to do at that time in my life. Erasmus is a program in the European Union through which any student from any EU country can study at another sister school, and by merit of CSULB having a partnership with Coventry in particular, gave me access to this experience. Everything from the dorms to the way in which the university was taught was a complete shock to me and foundationally shattered my perception of what university, education, and life in general could and should be. To speak specifically for the academics, Coventry was remarkably quick and dense with its content, but with some miracle, never taught it in a way that was ever overwhelming. Furthermore, the magic word that all college students hear in their dreams, “no homework”, is something I would be tempted to say about the take-home work load, although in truth this isn’t true and instead it would be more accurate to say it is a significantly more manageable workload. Therein, however, lies one piece of the puzzle as to why Coventry was so effective at teaching so much material in such little time. While in the United States, your grades are mostly determined by how much of the mountains of what amounts to meaningless busy-work you can get done with what stretched time you have between both major and general education courses, Coventry had no GE’s, and everyone’s major course load was the same as issued by the university. As such, there was seldom a week where I had any more than one or two pieces of significant homework to dedicate my entire focus toward with the exception of the last month of the semester. As such, at no time in Coventry was I ever forced to make the distinction between working and learning. Although to say this was the extend of the challenge while I was abroad would be inaccurate. 

To take advantage of the unique global situation, I decided to take 2 classes remotely from the USA, which remained locked down over the course of my stay abroad despite the UK since dropping quarantine measures. Furthermore, due to the time difference of 9 hours, I was able to comfortably attend my CSULB 9am class at 5pm from my dorm. With a further stroke of irony, I eventually found that my time in my classes taken remotely held a striking number of similarities to one of my classes in Coventry, which further split my attention three ways between my full course load at Coventry, my half load of classes at CSULB and the administrative investigations I’d been asked to carry out to confirm the similarities between the classes in question. Yet true to form, I also decided to split my time further between the aforementioned and the publication of my first independent book, Another Life. 

Of course, then there was the social aspect of the experience, which is truly where I believe ‘life-changing’ is an understatement for my feelings of the subject. With a level of irony, I’d found myself in a dorm with a population of myself, one British fellow from Sheffield, and about 6 others from various Dutch nations, which eventually extended to a friend group of 24, for which I was more than happy to serve as the groups’ party baker and chef. It was dynamic and, to an extent, insane, yet strangely comforting with the knowledge that everyone was also adapting to the situation as well. Gone was the thin veneer of non-issue of Long Beach where everyone could go home and find comfort. In Coventry, all of us were metaphorically in the same boat, and we were all navigating Coventry together. For a while, I had everything I’d ever asked for; good yet capable friends with varying levels of craziness, a community that I was genuinely a part of, a place I felt safe from the ever-present dangers of my own city, and even my first romantic relationship that I could honestly say in retrospect I have no regrets of. Yet this is when my lack of preparedness becomes relevant, as I struggled to quickly adapt to this new life. I was unprepared to be happy in such a way, and as such struggled to adapt to the environment with a prevailing sense of paranoia and would expect to need to overwork myself at every turn. While it took time, the aforementioned relationship was what allowed me to find peace in myself unlike anything I was able to do before, and for a while, I was content in my closet-sized yet remarkably comfortable accommodation. It felt strange being content with where I was, of course not translating to stagnation in my academics or other parts of my life, but I finally saw what life could be if carried sustainably. In the end, I have no regrets in my time at Coventry. Lessons were learned, and while there was a learning curve to integrate, I have no regrets. Yet of course, I had to come home. 

Return to CSULB and Graduation

My return home was strange, not necessarily bittersweet per se, but more so like that scene in the Matrix when Neo is asked if he’d want to go back to his old life after he’d taken the red pill. In my case, Long Beach was the Matrix, and I immediately wanted to leave the moment I returned home. But of course, that wasn’t an option as long as I had work to do. As such, with too many credits to transfer to another school like CSU Fullerton without sacrificing some credits, I begrudgingly made peace with the fact that I would need to ‘regear’ myself to the old way of working. Ironically, this is when I would finally begin taking courses that would expand on the field that I’d fallen in love with. Of the courses that I’d taken online while in Coventry, one of them was Thermodynamics under Dr. Hank Baggeri, whom I would again see for the capstone class for the thermodynamics class chain, Heat Transfer. However, one class that I unexpectedly took to was that of power plant design, the second class in thermodynamics, under Dr. Darr Hashempour. I would struggle in this class until the first exam, which I failed spectacularly. Yet after a meeting where Dr. Hashempour would help me with a critically needed paradigm shift from that of pure theoretical math to that of proper engineering with context, as well as advice for how to work better as an engineer in general as part of a team. I quickly found myself fascinated by thermal engineering with a newfound understanding that set it apart from other subjects in my mind, and likewise looked to Dr. Hashempour as a mentor both in the field and in engineering in general. Upon my graduation and pursuit of a masters degree, he would go as far as to provide a letter of recommendation to the Politecnico di Milano in Milan, Italy for Energy Engineering, their parrallel to a masters in thermal engineering. 

Upon my return, I also set myself forth to do more than simply be a worker behind a desk and instead branch out into other things. As such, I found myself in quite unpredictable places. The last full year I was home, I decided to take a variety of especially random classes such as salsa dancing, consumer dynamics, and fencing foil. In the more active of these, I became comfortable with truly leaving my comfort zone behind and exploring both other skillsets and the people that partake in them.

I graduated with a bachelors of science in mechanical engineering in the Fall of 2023. All of my friends were gone, graduated the year prior, and as such, I knew no one at my graduation ceremony in the following May. There were a few familiar faces here and there, but in the end, I was only happy that it was over. In the time since, I’d try to reconnect with some old friends and the ones I’d made along the way, with mixed results. Ultimately, I would come to the conclusion that I’d outgrown more than my university, but the city itself. Long Beach contributed to the person I am today, but my future demands me to be elsewhere. I was never meant to achieve much, but I did anyways. 

It would be disingenuous to talk about my time at LBCC. I’ve spent a total of two semesters and one summer at this campus, although this time was broken up between two periods years apart.

For consistencies sake, my first time at LBCC was in the January of 2019 after my grades at CSULB dipped below the undergraduate requirement to declare my major as mechanical engineering. To circumvent my inevitable academic hold and effective end of my university career, I opted to spend the next calendar year at the nearby community college. While this time wasn’t in the plan, I ultimately did benefit from certain unexpectedly remarkable professors. One of which who I still remember today was the reason why I finally passed Calculus 2 after 4 consecutive semesters, Adam Richardson. Through his ability to visualize the nature of mathematics, Mr. Richardson is the reason why I found myself fascinated by the mechanisms that various functions can produce, which would eventually lead to my mindset which allows me now to mathematically model complex mechanisms in my modern projects. In addition, I opted to expose myself to the world of skill trades through a home improvement and renovation class, in which I was easily the one with the softest hands and least experience. Above anything else, this class taught me the limits of my engineering education and the value of knowing more functional skillsets as opposed to a purely theoretical “book-smart” mindset.

My return to LBCC wouldn’t come until I’d long since graduated from CSULB and I was enduring the arduous post-2023 job search. After thousands of job applications up to this point in 2024(yes, thousands) had yielded no results, I was beginning to run out of options and hope. So, since my time in engineering had seemingly left me with no better choice, I opted not to trap myself in the theoretical corner than many desk-bound students find themselves in. In an act of near desperation, I signed up for a SMAW (Stick) Welding class.

At first, I would quite enjoy working with my hands again. I frankly enjoyed, for a lack of better words, banging my head against a wall until I slowly got better at what it was that I was doing. Of course, I had a pair of excellent professors and mentors in this class to help me along the way and frankly kept my momentum pushing forward. After a while, though, something began to nag at me at a fundamental level. It wasn’t the splatters of molten steel and slag that would jump down my sleeves and burn my hands and neck, nor was it the summer heat that, by noon, was dripping off my forehead and smudging my visor from the inside while I worked, bent over my work. Instead, it was the knowledge that my life was still going nowhere by all metrics. Every day when I was in the welding shop practicing alone in my work booth, I would look up from behind my welding helmet and respirator at a tiny patch of sky that peeked out from the skylight of the warehouse and feel exactly the same as I had when I was doing mountains of work behind a desk with nothing to show for my efforts. Depression would quickly set in by the end of the first month, and shortly thereafter I would drop out. Yet I had still acquired a modest proficiency in a skill that would eventually contribute to my confidence to pursue some of my most ambitious projects thus far in both automotive and carbon fiber design. I have no regrets in returning to LBCC, only that it’d taken me so long.