 I knew that I wanted to go to grad school for a master's degree. I was looking for universities that had good biomedical engineering programs, with Marquette being in Milwaukee, and the Midwest is actually one of the bigger biomedical engineering hubs outside of Silicon Valley. The people here were some of the nicest that I've ever met. I felt like my first couple days here, people were going more out of the way to greet me. Three-minute thesis, the first time I saw it, I was an undergrad, and they had to give all the information about their project in three minutes or less, or they couldn't do it. You finally got to see the big picture through some of these projects. You know what the day-to-day process is for doing your research, but then you have to take a step back and be like, okay, but how do I explain this to somebody if I'm meeting them for the first time? I remembered leaving that competition that I watched, being like, man, I'd really like to do that as a grad student, and then I found out that they have one at Marquette. Sometimes you hate when you go to a ball game and it takes you 30 minutes longer to leave the stadium than it took to watch the game, dodging people with a good session stand, trying to get out of the parking lot, it's enough to try to be in the same. Now imagine that stadium was completely empty, and it still took you the same amount of time to leave as it did to all those obstacles, just because you couldn't walk fast. Unfortunately, that is a reality faced by 800,000 Americans this year who struggle to walk after having a stroke. A common impairment after a stroke that affects your walking ability is called drop foot, or the inability to lift your toes on one side of your body. My thesis work was the design, the development, and testing of a new ankle joint that would prevent drop foot without causing unnatural walking. The competition was judged by a panel of experts in different fields. They even had the mayor and I won. This year's 2019 three-minute thesis $1,000 award winner and the one to represent Marquette University at the regional competition is Eileen Baker. It was terrifying and exciting. I'd like to just keep working on the new stuff like that, our research and development is really the more interesting side of things. Coming up with something that nobody has thought before, or finding a better way to do something that nobody had realized would work before, is what's most exciting for me. Being able to think about those bigger problems and projects at Marquette was nice. A lot of the time senior design projects are required by universities to really show off all the skills that you've learned during the first four years of your life. But Marquette really made those projects interesting and useful and they weren't really just abstract, oh build this thing and make it better. And so that is a lot more useful to the world than some of the engineering programs that just want to crank out those engineers to build bridges and make money. It's not just getting next high paid job, it's about doing something that matters and really challenging the students to find something that matters to you because once you do you can actually make a difference in it.