How a Student Becomes a Michigan Engineer

By Bill Clayton

The Michigan Engineering experience is all about growth - in the classroom and in the lab, at part-time jobs in the real world, at social events, in extracurricular activities and in volunteer capacities. These aspects of each student's life develop engineers who are complete people - book-smart, eager for challenge, ethical, social, helpful and perceptive.

Yang Li, a second-year student in Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences (AOSS), is going through this process of becoming a well-rounded person who happens to be an engineer with a dream.

"I think everyone in the Aero department comes in with similar dreams," he said. "Maybe a fascination with the shuttle going into space, or with videos of F-14s flying majestically through the sky. It's always been a dream of mine to work on these things and I guess I'm just chasing that dream."

His pursuit involves a routine that isn't easy but is getting him where he wants to go.

During a day in the life of Yang Li, the Michigan Engineering
Fund makes many things possible - updated labs and classrooms,
modernized facilities and wireless Internet access, to name just
some of the support that Yang and other students receive.
PHOTO BY DAVID TUMAN

The day starts early with an email check, and ends late in exhaustion, at about 1:30 a.m. And in the hours between, he crisscrosses North Campus for classes at the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building and the François-Xavier Bagnoud Building, meals with friends in Bursley Hall, extra work at the Plasmadynamics and Electric Propulsion Laboratory (PEPL) and the Student Space Systems Fabrication Laboratory (S3FL) and, of course, some concentrated study.

That's a rough sketch of a day in the life of Yang Li, the student. But the day of Yang Li, the student becoming a person of depth and breadth, goes much farther.

"Last semester, as an electee of Tau Beta Pi, I helped out in a lot of service projects," he said. "One that sticks out in my mind is standing in the middle of the diag on Central Campus in freezing cold, doing a bucket drive for Mott's Children Hospital."

Li also pitched in during Tech Day, showing secondary school students around the College, explaining what an engineer is. What Li can't explain to them is how much energy he pours into becoming a Michigan Engineer. And what he can't seem to explain to anyone is how he still finds time in each packed day to hang with friends or fly his radio-controlled helicopter.

Perhaps to prove that he's only human, Li gave up his spot on the fencing team at the beginning of freshman year because he "just didn't have the time."

Li and Associate Professor Peter Washabaugh.
PHOTO BY DAVID TUMAN

Li invests his extra hours following carefully plotted paths created in great part by mentors such as Peter Washabaugh, an associate professor in AOSS. Li said that Washabaugh has been particularly helpful in projects at the S3FL. "Currently," Li said, "I'm the chief systems engineer on the primary project of the lab, a pair of satellites called Tethered SATellite Testbed, or TSATT. It's a student project, and the lab consists of undergraduate and graduate students who work on the design of satellites and other space-related projects."

TSATT gives students the opportunity to design, manufacture and launch a pair of tethered nanosatellites to test advanced sensor technologies for formation flying and automated rendezvous and docking. "TSATT would serve as a test platform for validating technologies that're vital to future spacecraft that will go to the Moon and beyond," Li said. "It's complex, but we're getting all the support we need from our primary faculty advisor, Professor Gilchrist, and Professor Washabaugh." Brian Gilchrist is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and one of the department's associate chairs; he's also a professor in AOSS.

Li's path also leads to the PEPL, where he's an undergraduate research assistant. "This semester, I've been working with a graduate student on the design of a new halleffect thruster for space-based applications," he said, explaining further that propulsion is a topic that "put together everything I had learned up to this point."

What Li does now will determine how good an engineer - and a person - he'll become, and whether or not his dream will come true. "I'd like to be a lead of some sort on a next-generation shuttle concept," he said. "I want to be part of the effort that launches people to space stations, the Moon or even Mars."

He's giving everything he has to get there. The College is giving it back. And they're both doing it one day at a time. -E

Editor's Note: Yang Li is the recipient of funding from the Michigan Engineering Fund. http://www.engin.umich.edu/relations/giving