Abstract
Engineering is about reaching for the unattainable. The greatest engineering achievements are often inseparable from challenge and struggle. As a young engineer, I was sold on the idea that this field is unlike any other in how iterative and transformative it is. Reflecting on my four years in engineering courses, I felt like I had to fight for the chance to iterate on projects in my own time to make up for what I was missing from my courses. After discussing this with my peers, I realized I was not alone. Textbook- and lecture-led courses are being strained by ever-growing domain and technology complexity, but more importantly, these courses fail to promote learning through error. No one comes to engineering at UVA to make mistakes, and I could not stand to see that culture perpetuated. As someone who struggled through the current education systems, I wanted my sociotechnical project to advocate for students who struggled not because of engineering itself, but because the ways they truly learned existed outside the conventions taught at UVA. This also relates to my technical thesis, where I have learned more than anywhere else in my degree by working on HEDGE-2, reflecting on mistakes, refining designs, and seeing firsthand how fallibility can strengthen engineering practice. At the same time, the enterprises engineers are entering are becoming more ethically convoluted, and many problems demand serious reconsideration. Engineers are not only taught technical skills, but also mindsets, and I hope that if UVA engineers are prepared to confront these issues seriously, they will be able to make the right decisions when the time comes.
In my STS research, I investigated the conflation of failure and fallibility in engineering through institutional, cultural, and philosophical contexts. I worked to uncover definitions for each term to explain that fallibility is innocent of the stigma associated with it through this conflation. To understand why engineering so strongly cautions against failure and why it carries such negative connotations, I used the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework to analyze an ethnographic interpretation of the Challenger disaster. This case helped me verify my definition of failure in a real engineering context. To examine whether undergraduate engineers benefit from fallibility and whether their courses adequately prepared them, I surveyed and interviewed students and faculty at UVA to identify recurring themes. Although the interviews remain largely incomplete, informal conversations with both groups suggest that engineering students need a method of learning that is an intermediate between lecture- and project-based coursework.
For my technical portion of my thesis, I worked on the Hypersonic ReEntry Deployable Glider Experiment 2 (HEDGE-2) team, where we demonstrated the feasibility of a relatively inexpensive, optimized hypersonic CubeSat project. The project’s primary goal was to launch through NASA’s Rocksat program and collect and transmit scientific data to our ground station during flight in low Earth orbit. I contributed significantly to the avionic operations and am responsible for designing, manufacturing, and testing the Deck PCB associated with RockSat. This board manages HEDGE-2’s deployment, footage capturing, and data reception. This project represents a significant step towards making hypersonic and spaceflight experimentation more affordable, accessible, and optimized for research groups and satellite developers.
The world can benefit from engineers who are more thoughtful and willing to actively question the world around them, without tuning out completely. As technological growth becomes more sporadic, engineers must be equipped not only with technical abilities but also ethical and philosophical knowledge. I believe that virtue ethics would be a good starting point for developing not only better engineers, but better people. Engineers cannot be forced into a certain character, but they can be prepared for difficult moments. To create meaningful change, there must be a marriage between social and technical considerations; too much of either alone is insufficient. Only by considering both together can we make an irrefutable attempt to address the world’s most difficult problems.
The HEDGE-2 team would like to thank Systems, Planning, & Analysis, Inc. and the Parents Program, who have funded our project and made it possible. We also are very thankful for NASA’s Rocksat program for providing us with the opportunity to launch. I would like to personally thank Mike McPherson for helping me and the Avionics team so much along the way; his knowledge and guidance is invaluable. I would also like to thank William Davis, for guiding and pushing me in directions within my sociotechnical work—he was often the other half to my conversations and helped me grow alongside my work.
