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Where can you go to make a difference in the world?
I wanted to, I guess do something that was applicable, that would really help people.
There's people in the world that don't even have access to basic human needs,
like housing, water and basic food.
To address the grand challenges of this world.
Whether it's something with food, which everyone needs, or water
or the environment which everybody depends on.
Many of todays students want to make a difference in the world.
The ones who choose Agricultural and Biological Engineering
in particular have seen a way that they can do that.
It makes excited to know that ABE and myself are located right in the middle,
in the heart of these problems and trying to attack them and deal with them.
The department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University.
The work we do here matters.
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The ABE, Ag and Biological Engineering department is one of the best
kept secrets on Purdue's campus in the school of Engineering.
A lot of people talk about Chem E and a lot of people talk about Aeronautical Engineering
and those are the big ones. We're south of State Street, we're kind of hidden.
I originally started out in Civil Engineering because I thought
I want to do environmental type work and I thought that's where you had to be.
I had a friend who was a fifth year senior in ABE and kind of opened the door to that.
I didn't realize that was even an option. Never heard of ABE before.
I went over and visited the department and it felt like family.
What's great about ABE it's a small family but with a lot of opportunities.
The coolest thing about this department is all the hands on experience you get
and the one-on-one attention that you get from the professors.
If you're going down the hallway the professors are actually going to say "HI!"
and know your name and recognize you in your class.
We have very small class sizes. Thirty people maximum in these classes.
Professors are available all the time. You can knock on their door and say
Hey, I'm having trouble with this or I'm having trouble with that.
I mean it's very small, people were very friendly.
You weren't just kind of a person in the crowd.
Yes, it's a small program but that's part of the reason I came here.
When you're in a small program you matter more.
I recommend everybody at least look into it and discover some of the things ABE has to offer.
It just gives you that personal interaction that not only helps you in your career and networking,
but that helps you in just getting through school.
So whether you want to go to the Agricultural side of things and you want
to work with machines or food processing or whether you want to be with what I'm doing
which is the biology and biosensors designing small chips that can interface with living things.
One of the neat things about the ABE department is it's basically
every other engineering field but with an agricultural application.
We have so many different sublet disciplines from food processing and
environmental, machines, bio-energy, biological things, air quality, water quality,
nanotechnology, you name it, it's done in this department.
Students can really grow in ABE.
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I think that the kind of student who often choose Agricultural and Biological Engineering are
those who want to make a difference in the world because that's really the focus of most of what we do.
Agricultural and Biological Engineering is a field you could go into where you could actually make a change.
One of the classes that we took was advanced hydrology and that was a great class.
I notice in my own life experience how water has impacted
so when I started taking classes in ABE I was able to solve some of these problems.
It makes me excited to know that ABE and myself are located right in the middle,
in the heart of these problems and trying to attack them and deal with them.
So it's very important to me in my education to be learning skills that I can
and already have used to improve the world.
I actually came from a different background, I came from a physics background.
I was studying that and enjoyed, thought it was really neat but
I wanted to do something that was applicable, that would really help people
make differences in their own lives and improve the quality of life for other people.
I have been able to learn real skills through my internships
and that I've been able to bring them directly to companies.
I've also helped the research community.
Basically, ABE and the people within at are very adept at helping you achieve those goals.
I think it is exciting because I wanted to do something that was technically challenging
and engineering is that but it is helping the community and the environment.
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I was a excited to start out in Agriculture and Biological Engineering because
it's really neat program, very diverse and a lot of real world applications.
You see people working on tractors, all kinds of grain and food processing all the way to
what we do which is environmental work.
You're exhaust is the main problem that we encountered a problem with.
We had to come up with a way to make it quieter.
An application like that could and is being used in industry.
We tend to be very applied department.
As we solve engineering problems like all the engineering fields, we use the same tools,
the mathematical tools, computer tools, etc. but most of ours have a specific application
in that someone wants to use these results to solve the worlds grand challenges.
What we're testing is a hydraulic system that is able to recover energy.
It's like your Toyota Prius.
When you step on the brakes of a Prius the kinetic energy of
the car moving down the round is transferred into electrical power and stored in batteries.
This system tries to do the exact same thing except in the hydraulic realm.
The professors in ABE, at least the ones I know, have always pushed their students to try new things.
One of the reason I came to ABE was the fact that they have a good reputation.
They work with a lot of government agencies , industry and working on real world research,
that actually gets implemented fairly recently or while you're still working on it.
In ABE I've worked on a project that involved specifically citing constructed wetlands.
Wetlands that you will construct to treat runoff coming off agricultural fields.
Taking out that nitrogen will eventually help downstream in the Gulf of Mexico.
My research is exciting because it's incorporating all the fundamentals of
engineering and then applying it in a real-world situation.
The students really get a win-win situation with this project.
Not only do they learn the engineering skills we want to teach them, just good fundamental design,
what it takes to have something hold up for a particular environment.
They design it one the computer, they build it, they predict its performance
after pick the gear ratio, but then there's also service learning and human aspect
of the vehicle where the application there really makes a difference in the lives of the people.
You put this tower up on the edge of a corn field. It's run off a 12-volt battery
because there are no outlets out in the corn fields.
It's recharged by the solar panel and it collects environmental data and it shoots it up through
a satellite signal to a computer server somewhere so I can sit at a computer in my office and see
what's going on on my different research sites across the state.
Knowing it's ultimate application I think you realize the importance of the work and you realize
how much of a time crunch you're in to get things done because this where we are
on the edge of technology right now.
We're delivering a project whether it be a tangible project or a design for something
that will pass on to an NGO or another institution in the field that can implement it and
ideally impact people's quality of life.
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Job placement is very good in ABE.
I believe we have a 99% job placement.
This part year several of our graduates got hired on with CAT
and then there are several that got hired on with John Deere.
As you know they're both really big companies.
Those companies are Caterpillar, John Deere, CNH. Parker has hired on several of our applicants as well.
We also have water companies, companies that are doing environmental studies.
Students in the environmental and natural resources engineering area are usually
either work for conservation agencies or an environmental agency like
the Department of Natural Resources
The companies that know us, that know of Ag and Biological Engineering students
they eat us up every year.
The fact that we have big companies like that coming and recruiting our people
it just shows the quality of education here.
Every time the department says "here are our graduates", these companies are right there,
first in line to say we want this perosn or we want that person.
Once they get that first ABE graduate in there, that company will come back reliably year-after-year
and hire graduates.
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Where can you go to make a difference in the world?
To address the grand challenges of this world?
The department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Purdue University.
The work we do here matters.