 I've been installing this for about a little over a week now and I have definitely run into problems. I didn't think I would so that has put me behind schedule. I'm Izzy Block and I am a fifth-year student at Purdue University studying multidisciplinary engineering with a concentration in theater engineering and theater design and production. I went to forming art high school and that just taught me more of the background. Nothing with engineering. I kind of put that together myself and I just looked up theater engineering to see if something was already possible with combining these two things and that brought me to Purdue's website. It's so niche and everything in the industry right now really needs theater engineers. People who can do the engineering math and science and usually you can get one or the other. It's hard to find someone who can do both. Purdue University is the only place where theater engineering is a thing where I can get an ABET accredited degree in engineering and theater engineering. The ABET accreditation provides for a framework that means that engineering degree is as substantial and as rigorous as any other engineering degree in the country. They just have focused a little bit more in live entertainment than other engineering students. I think it's fair to say right now we are the only one of its kind in the country that's focused as much on education and teaching and learning as we are. The Fusion Studio for entertainment engineering came into being in March of 2020. It arose out of the growth and visibility of the theater engineering concentration here at Purdue. We created the center that's focused on exploring and disseminating and sharing the best practices of teaching and learning in the shared space of entertainment and engineering. With Fusion Studio they have given us a lot of opportunities even just small things like getting more technology for us to play with in our controls classes and having our capstones be more exciting and more integrated into the shows. So for my capstone I will be creating a mechanism for Purdue's production of FFU and her friends. This particular set involves putting audience members on stage and they couldn't see the exit signs in the space if they were on stage with the set. I said this is perfect. Let's give Izzy the sort of mechanical and controls challenge. We are given projects that are impossible to solve because in the real world you're not going to be able to get a problem that's going to be solved without some type of compromise whether a part is really expensive or if math doesn't work out or if this is going to break. Once when I install this one I have one more to install and I should be done installing the wiring that I scheduled for about four or five days so I'm a little behind schedule but hopefully everything else goes a lot quicker. I chose pneumatic so I had to do a lot of pneumatic calculations to make sure if friction would be a problem and if it could lift the weight I wanted. I came up with a bunch of different concepts looking up different things I can buy to make it work and also doing the math to even see if it did work. So my mechanism that I designed have these exit signs living inside the walls and when the audience comes up on stage they will pop out and illuminate and then when the audience is not there they go back down. My practice with pneumatics wasn't that big and I learned to say yes to that and push myself more and not just stay in what I know because at the end of the day I'm here to learn and even if it's failing I'm still learning. Part of something that we focus on is like a what if it does fail because those backup plans are really needed if they're not if you don't have that plan with the director and it does fail what are you going to do and I went in there saying I'm confident it's not going to fail. The theater engineering concentration is somewhat competitive and small. The students who compete to be in it are self-select so it's a hard thing to get into it's a hard thing to do right you have to get into engineering you have to be a good engineer and you have to be able to make the time to work on productions regularly with us in the theater department and take those extra classes. They know that they have to put in that extra work they sort of are self selected to be really strong smart dedicated and persistent students. I learn a lot of persistence from the challenges I face and also specifically that if one thing doesn't work instead of digging yourself into a hole it's okay to take a step backwards and readdress the problem. From what I've learned through Purdue taught me that I'm more capable of what I think I actually am no matter if it's an exam a project anything I get the results back and that confidence that I build of hey I'm actually learning something where I actually understand this going back to my project of that giant leap I took to just test it because I was too scared to see it not work and it worked just feeling more confidence that I'm learning something and that I'm capable of learning something and that I actually can do stuff. A lot of people have that imposter syndrome and Purdue has really taught me to get out of that and be myself more and be proud of who I am. What keeps me going is I want to make cool stuff it's exciting to make something and then see it happen all within a short period of time and we are learning something more than just our engineering classes.