Alumni Profiles
Final Project: The Xiphias Project was a small team of students led by Scott to first develop a professional-grade automotive body using CAD and other product design tools/skills, and then applied a new computational simulation tool (topology optimization) to create a lightweight chassis structure that was custom-fitted to the car body. This chassis was meant to demonstrate the capabilities of topology optimization for additive manufacturing (3D printing) in an industrial application. Awarded first place in 2014 Stratasys Extreme Redesign Competition, and presented "Topology Optimization of a Crashworthy Structure in an Automotive Application" at the International Conference on Engineering and Applied Sciences Optimization in June 2014.
Currently: Engineer at Ingersoll Rand’s corporate division in North Carolina, working to define and execute on early stages of their Additive Manufacturing strategy across all their business units, as well as introduce topology optimization to products in order to reduce costs, increase performance/customer satisfaction, and move toward a more sustainable future.
Selling It: "When we search for jobs as college grads, we’ve got a problem to solve—that we don’t have a job and we need to start getting paid to keep on living. A lot of us get frustrated when we don’t receive job offers because those companies who say “no” aren’t helping us solve that problem. But companies are only hiring because they have a problem to solve, too—they’ve got urgent work that needs attention and more people on board. Nobody is going to hire me because they see I need a job and just feel like helping me out. So if I build my college career around solving other people’s problems, it’s staggering how immediately opportunities open up. Always find the other person’s problem and find a way to help them better than anyone else can."