Exploring Engineering Ep. 06: Engineering science program

Jacqueline Thibault
It’s kind of strange, because whenever I tell people what my major is, they’re like, oh, you’re a triple major. And I’m like, no, it’s just one.

Laura Vogt
That was Jacqueline Thibault, a current engineering student. We’ll be hearing more from her in a moment. Hi, I’m Laura Vogt, director of student communications for UC Berkeley Engineering’s marketing and communications team. I’m also the host and producer of this podcast Exploring Engineering at UC Berkeley.

This episode, we explore engineering science, which is a program in Berkeley Engineering composed of four different majors: energy engineering, engineering mathematics and statistics, engineering physics, and environmental engineering science.
Engineering science is engineering for people who love science, want an interdisciplinary approach to learning, and want to pursue careers in green tech, energy systems, solar engineering, and so much more.

I’m excited for you to hear from Jacqueline Thibault about her journey into being an engineering student. I was surprised at how so many different aspects of her coursework helped at one of her first internships.

Jacqueline Thibault
My name is Jackie Thibault. I’m currently a fourth-year student. I’m majoring in engineering math and stats.

I guess I chose this major when I came into Berkeley. I was originally in Letters and Science, and I was planning on doing applied math, but I was kind of interested in maybe, like some sort of engineering minor. I wasn’t really sure yet.
So I took Physics 7A and then my GSI told me, you seem to have an affinity for this kind of subject, like, you should consider switching into engineering. And I was like, oh, this is interesting.

So then I kind of researched the process of what it would be like or what my major would be. I was interested in math, but I wasn’t too sure how I would use this, and I thought maybe it would be more helpful to tie it in with a more engineering focus.
So I was just stalking the website, and then I found the engineering math and stats major. And I was like, this is interesting. It ties together math, physics, and engineering in a really interesting way. That’s kind of like a choose-your-own-adventure kind of major. I always hear, I didn’t, honestly, I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I was like, this sounds cool. I would be able to take a lot of cool classes.

I applied to transfer into engineering, and I successfully was able to do that. And since then, it’s been really cool.
The engineering focus that I chose was this computer science one. So I’ve been taking computer science classes as well. And I think my different knowledge in different fields has been kind of amalgamated in an interesting way, so I can approach certain problems from sort of an intersectional angle, like my internships.

I guess the way that most recently, how my major has helped me in those internships was my last internship. I was in Atlanta last summer, at Alcon, which was the name of the company. They make machines that do eye surgery and different things related to eye healthcare.

The team that I was on was on metrology for contact lenses. What that meant was they’re trying to develop this new kind of diffractive contact lens with different structures on the surface than a traditional contact lens would have.
Their current prototypes had some defects on the surface, and they’re trying to figure out what was happening.
I was doing image processing on those images of the contact lenses under the microscope, and it was really interesting because a lot of the defects that you would see weren’t exactly directly visible; you would have to infer them from different physics properties.

The main one I used was Newton rings because the equipment that we were using could only detect surface modulations up to a resolution of one micron. But if you could see the way the wavelength of the light was behaving underneath the apparatus, you could get your resolution down to like 0.2 microns, indirectly measuring based on the wavelength of light, because it’s like the distance between two wavelength crests is equal to half of the wavelength of the light that’s used to take the picture.
So we were able to, I would take those images, and then my goal was to reconstruct an image in 3D of what it would look like.
That was interesting because it was a lot of coding. It was typing in stuff that I was learning from physics as well, and I definitely would not have known that if I didn’t do this major and different math concepts that helped me understand what I was even doing.

So I wasn’t just blindly applying some algorithms without understanding why I was doing it or potential drawbacks.
I think a lot of them were kind of disconnected. I was working with space science stuff and also fire, trying to get fire data science things out, and then like image processing.

So it seems kind of disconnected, but it all had the underlying thing of it used data and coding frameworks to try to get meaningful information out of things that might not be obvious what the conclusion should be.

Laura Vogt
My conversation with Jackie then pivoted to the engineering science majors as a whole. My first question was, what advice did she have for students interested in one of the majors, and how would they even know that this was the path for them?
She wholeheartedly believes that if you have interest, you should analyze the options.

Jacqueline Thibault
What you are interested in, because if you do like civil engineering or something like that, I think that’s very well developed. But if you are kind of interested in maybe more non-traditional majors, or going into these growing fields, such as environmental engineering, I think is very important for the future.

I think because with the major, it’s not immediately clear what it entails, you feel like you’re applying to maybe a software role they would take someone that’s majoring in computer science over this like random thing that they don’t know what it is.
Maybe it’s a bit of a drawback in some aspects, but like many things, I think it’s what you get out of it, what you want to put into it.

I really appreciated the interdisciplinary aspect of the major.

Laura Vogt
Did you find it difficult to transfer from L&S into engineering math and stats?

Jacqueline Thibault
No, I thought it was pretty straightforward. The only thing is, they tell you you shouldn’t rely on being able to do that, so you still have to make progress on the current major that you’re planning to do it, which in my case was an L&S.

But the classes that I was taking, they overlapped a lot, especially the math classes, but the ones like physics, I was like, okay, if I didn’t do engineering, I could use that for a minor or something.

As with many things, I think if you are interested in something, it’s always worth it to at least give it a chance.

If this is something that you enjoy doing, I think that’s a good indicator, as well as trying out different clubs.

I think there’s a lot of different clubs with lots of people with different majors, and you can talk to them about it, as well as seeing if, through this club, you enjoy the kind of work that they do or the kind of projects that they find—to kind of find your niche.

I think the good thing about engineering science is definitely that you can find a niche within this because a lot of it is you can choose which classes and classes that you want to take that would be useful to your future, that maybe you wouldn’t have the chance to take in a different major.

Even if you come into school being very sure what you want to do, I would not automatically discount other opportunities that you might not have initially considered, because you come to the university also to grow as a person.
Just being open to new things and trying stuff that you might not have initially considered, I think, is one of the best ways to make the most that you can out of being a student.

Laura Vogt
Any of the majors in the engineering science program, which again, are energy engineering, engineering mathematics and statistics, engineering physics, and environmental engineering science, can give you the opportunity to dive into subjects that you find the most interesting.

It’s such an interdisciplinary degree.

I really appreciated Jackie’s explanation of how her first internship used so many aspects of her education, from computer science to the physics property of Newton rings.

Understanding how the coursework of a major will guide you in your internships and your research and your career in such a hands-on way is just an amazing way to understand what studying a major will do for you.

Exploring Engineering is just the beginning step for learning more about the engineering sciences.

Visit our podcast webpage, engineering.berkeley.edu/exploringengineering, to check out resources, links, and videos, including some animated shorts about each major created by and for our summer program Girls in Engineering.

And please share this podcast series with your friends, classmates, and counselors so others can learn and explore what being an engineer means.