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Hi, I'm Quin. I'm currently a junior-ish in Mechanical and Biomedical engineering (the double major makes years complicated). I work at the Idea Forge here at CU in the rapid prototyping lab 3D printing and Laser cutting fabrication requests that we get from students, faculty, and researchers alike. As much as I love my job over at the idea forge, what I really want to end up doing is fabricating prosthetics and orthotics. 

I've loved tinkering for as long as I can remember and as a little kid, remember getting into my parents' toolbox to make random little circuits and devices, including a paper lamp complete with LED and battery when I broke my mom's and tried to replace it (in case you couldn't have guessed, she noticed). It wasn't until high school that I started seeing all of the ways that engineering can help people and fell in love with rehabilitation technology after designing and building a variety of devices to help students and community members with disabilities. I made everything from a weighted vest batman costume and custom pencil grip to help a kindergarten student learn how to write in a way that worked for him, to an adjustable necklace to hold a communication device for a high school student at another school. I found my current passion through designing a proof of concept EEG prosthetic arm for an upper arm amputee. During that whole process, I loved the fabrication and even more so, knowing that the work I was doing was going to help someone.

As a Queer engineering major, my CU journey hasn't always been smooth but hopefully, this will give some visibility to Queer students in STEM and encourage others that see this. Outside of work and classes (which let's be honest isn't much time), I enjoy hiking and exploring Boulder Creek's water bugs with my partner, taking care of my rescue hermit crabs, and raising way more house plants than should be living in my basement apartment. I'm also an exec board member of CU's chapter of Theta Pi Sigma, oSTEM general member, and BOLD scholar so I've ended up tied to CU in a lot of ways but am definitely looking forward to pursuing a career of using what I've learned here to help people after I graduate.