Kai Collins Email & Phone Number

I love to create, and I am always excited to learn to do so. Throughout my years of high school and my current time at Carnegie Mellon University I’ve taken classes and participated in clubs that allowed me to build, design, and develop my ideas and make them reality. I’ve especially enjoyed my core mechanical engineering classes and projects such as where a small team and I designed, built, and tested trusses with specific breaking strengths. My passion for creating extends outside my direct engineering fields as I learned to code in Python last semester and created a term project in four weeks that incorporated object oriented programming, graphics, and basic game AI. My coursework and activities at CMU have made me more comfortable with working in a professional engineering setting. I designed and manufactured the accelerator pedal as part of CMU’s FSAE racing team where I gained skills in welding, CAD, FEA, and CAM along with valuable team experience as I designed the pedal and helped with manufacturing the car’s chassis. The team operates off a business structure with system leads designing systems of the car with related systems organized into teams for easier management and integration which I have found helpful when managing deadlines and working with others. Engineering courses are based around project management and group work.In addition to creative skills, my communication has developed through my engineering work. In the past, I’ve strengthened my communication skills by teaching children music and now I frequently work with teams in engineering classes, public policy classes, and on the racing team. I’ve learned effective risk communication and communication for different audiences as part of my additional major in Engineering and Public Policy. On the racing team designing the accelerator pedal with other systems in mind to ensure nothing interfered took significant planning and cross-team communication as we had to identify each relevant subsystem and discuss if our designs worked together. Additionally, the pedal system went through two design reviews where I justified design choices to the team’s captains and previous design leads via a presentation.I will continue to hone my creativity and take pride in my work as I enter the industry. I’m excited to see what I can make next!

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  Carnegie Mellon University

  Mechanical Engineering