Engineers love to build things, Andy Cohen says, but the things themselves aren’t really the point.
“Engineering is being able to apply scientific principles to a human-relevant problem,” said Cohen, who is in his second year of a mechanical engineering doctoral program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
It’s a lesson that was brought home last year when he got stuck in a blizzard on his way back to school at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg after visiting Harvard to research the doctoral programs.
Stranded in the Charlotte, N.C., airport, he persuaded some other passengers to rent a car with him and drive the last leg back to Virginia.
“One thing you should know about me is that I attract travel disasters,” he said.
The group, forced off the highway onto a back road because of a road closure, soon got stuck. They ended up being taken to the fire and EMS station in tiny, rural Floyd, Va., to wait out the storm.
Over breakfast the next day, Cohen struck up a conversation with Ann Boyd, first lieutenant personnel of the Floyd EMS. He told her that his college biomedical design team was working on developing an emergency lift system for patients.
“We did a ton of market research,” Cohen said. “The most shocking stat we found was that one in four emergency medical technicians will suffer a career-ending injury on their first four years of the job. It’s insane.”