 My name is Megan Lim and I'm in the School of Material Science and Engineering. Swimming here has been one of the greatest experiences and I couldn't have picked a better school to go to. One of the main reasons I picked coming to Purdue was because I wanted to do engineering, but initially coming in I didn't know what discipline I wanted to go into, but first year engineering does a really good job, helping students decide what they wanted to do, and when they presented on materials engineering I was really intrigued. It wasn't initially something I was aware of. I have seen over the year what the power of sport has to convey a message to students. They understand what is better, what is less good, how can I improve it? That means they understand a lot of the materials they have heard in classes in a very practical way. And this is why I like to combine this course sport technology and entrepreneurship. Now there is a way for them to think about, oh, maybe here is an opportunity for me to create a company with my good idea. Growing up my entire life, getting to use these different cool technical suits, I wanted to figure out what are these actually made out of. And so coming into materials I kind of had this career path where I wanted to be working for one of the swimsuit manufacturers and actually developing the materials associated with it. And that's one of the main reasons that I actually got involved in materials engineering. The athletes taking the course. Athletes that are extremely fine tuned to see, feel small differences. They are the best testing ground for new equipment and apparels we can have. And that's why I'm so happy to have two athletes. I can always refer to them. And they have answers that goes beyond what we scientists would have. In a practice setting, the suits we actually wear are pretty low-tech. Just like a brief and they are just made out of different polyester materials. However, when we do a race, we transition into something much more high-tech, which are these suits here. And what's so interesting about these is that they're super hydrophobic. And so if you were to dip them into water, the water would actually bubble up on it and would not stick to the suit and when you pull it out it would actually be dry. And then another thing that was interesting to me is how the suits between different manufacturers were so different. One example of that is this is the laser from Speedo. And what they've done is taken an approach to compression where they have these plastic seams that actually strengthen the suit around your hips. But a different manufacturer took a different approach and they actually implemented carbon into the suit to help it mold your body and help it maintain its tightness. There are three things that give resistance in water. It's the shape or the form drag and that's coming from dolphin shape you can have. Form it with the power of the swimsuits. Then you have a wave drag that is how you float in the water. And the third one is the surface drag. The treatment of the surface is extremely important. Here you want it to be very repellent to water and it just pours off and it's totally dry. The speed of new product coming on the market sport driven is very high and this is a motivation that is easy to convey to the students and they understand the importance of it for they live it every day. I initially didn't really look into a lot of materials in the sports industry outside of swimming because that's where my focus and interest were but since taking MSc 597 the sports technology and entrepreneurship class it really brought on my perspective with how materials affects a lot of different sports. One of the things that I really liked about the class was that he brought in a different guest speaker almost every time and a few of those people were really related to swimming. One of the guys was the leading world expert on swimming biomechanics and my coaches actually came to that class it was really cool for me so I really liked that he just brought in this diverse group of people that had these different experiences and talked about sport and then engineering and sport and it was a really unique approach to the class that I thought was really beneficial. So now there is an opportunity for them to learn how do I create a company with a unique idea. How do I put together my best knowledge and how do I create a business plan that makes sense to create a company and convince people to invest money in you and your idea.