Hello! My name is Rehan Manjila and I’m a sophomore bioengineering student in the Swanson School of Engineering. This Spring I’m a Teaching Assistant for ENGR 12 (Intro to Engineering Computing) after also TA’ing for ENGR 11 (Intro to Engineering Analysis) last Fall. They’re some of the classes that make up the ‘first-year engineering curriculum’ that freshman complete to gain the requisite background knowledge for more advanced courses and to learn about different disciplines of engineering. I’m very passionate about teaching, having done various forms of tutoring through middle school, high school, and here at Pitt in the Study Lab, so finally having the opportunity to pursue my own educational ideas through the Chancellor’s Undergraduate Teaching Fellowship was something I was incredibly excited about.

I was inspired by my own experience of going through these introductory courses, which teaches fundamental skills that all engineers would benefit from having – how to work in a team, design and entrepreneurship, and programming skills in Excel, MATLAB, and C. I felt like I learned a lot, but would have liked more chances to apply my knowledge and see how I might use these skills in the field as an engineer. This is a sentiment I’ve noticed from many of my peers and students – they end up less invested in the class because they don’t see how it is relevant to them or how they would use these skills in the future.

To address some of these concerns, I’ll be implementing ‘Case Studies in Engineering’ – an assignment that gives students a MATLAB programming project to complete based on a topic they can pick from a list of major-specific prompts. Students can use what they learned in class while challenging themselves to learn more; the choice of engineering topic would aid students in deciding whether a major is for them or introduce them to a new one entirely; and increase student engagement overall.

Figure. Protein simulation from the Alphafold Database (Jumper, J et al. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature (2021); Varadi, M et al. AlphaFold Protein Structure Database: massively expanding the structural coverage of protein-sequence space with high-accuracy models. Nucleic Acids Research (2022)) side-by-side with a simple MATLAB simulation for the Chemical Engineering prompt to design an algorithm that randomly generates molecules as chains of atoms – a simplified version of computational techniques actually being used in industry and academia to predict protein structure.

I look forward to working with my advisor, Dr. Irene Mena, and the rest of the FYEC faculty over this semester to introduce these projects to students, see what they make, and better prepare them for all their future engineering pursuits.