 My name is Angela and I'm a senior studying mechanical engineering and psychological sciences with a minor in global engineering. I'm a part of the engineers with outborders part of EPICS and it's been an absolutely amazing experience throughout my time here at Purdue. I've had a bunch of roles within the team including being on the human-centered design team and then eventually getting to lead that for an entire year and now I'm on the technical team. EPICS has absolutely changed my entire outlook on engineering and I can honestly say I wouldn't still be in engineering today if it wasn't for EPICS. It really gives you that sort of feeling and passion towards working to a real-life project and it makes you very motivated to go and gain those experiences elsewhere like through internships. I would definitely say my favorite memory was getting to go to Bolivia. It was an absolutely phenomenal experience. Basically we went up high into the Andes Mountains and we were at 14,000 feet elevation. Getting to sort of design a water distribution system in a terrain like that was really interesting especially because in classes you basically have everything based on assumptions and you don't get to use those same assumptions when designing in a place like that and so being able to go in country and actually talk to the people we were helping and being a part of that interview process with them was really heartwarming and what was really cool about that was I actually got class credit for that and it counted as a study abroad so it counted towards my global engineering minor as well. It's never too late to start on a project like this because you're getting that real-world experience and no matter what it's gonna be helpful towards your professional life later on. No matter which point you start at you're learning the design process it really makes you stand out compared to your peers when it comes to the experience you have on your resume. I can definitely say like even now as a senior as I'm looking for full-time jobs all I do is talk about engineers without borders when I'm interviewing with companies. Companies love to see not only your cross-functional experience but being able to work on real-world projects and the ambiguity that comes with all of that as well. It's very obvious to employers when you work on a project that you really care about and are passionate for something that I've noticed within my own interviews is they'll say stuff like I can tell you actually worked on the project but being in EPICS gives you something to actually put on your resume that you can be proud of really passionate about and be excited to talk about and it really shows through to employers. To be honest I came back every semester mostly because I was so attached to the project like I couldn't leave it and just like go on the rest of my college life without like being a part of the implementation process so all of those reasons had me coming back every single semester even as a senior. To me, engineering projects and community service just means being able to use the knowledge you gain and put that towards a real world solution and I like to think of it as a partnership between you and your community members because it's not only about you helping them it's them helping you also become a better engineer and gaining your experiences through other avenues in order to work in other community service projects or in your professional life as well. Overall it's really helped me decide what I want to do in the future because being design lead of the human-centered design team I realized I really like engineering management and so now I'm looking into full-time jobs that definitely have that as a career path for me.