This morning I was warmly greeted by an email confirming my fully-funded admission to WPI’s graduate mechanical engineering program.

This opportunity first presented itself to me in late October while browsing CFD Online’s job board. I was a frequent lurker of the forums during my internship at DEKA R&D, when I was most in the weeds with OpenFOAM. Several years later I only find myself checking it periodically, but it was just my luck that a funded CFD research position had opened up on the east coast.

I had recently left the testing team for Ansys’s Fluent CFD package after realizing that I was advancing my platform/DevOps engineering skillset, rather than my analysis skillset. I also found that my lack of graduate education limited the areas my managers were comfortable letting me work in.

Even at DEKA I felt this limitation: I was brought onto a testing team with the understanding that I’d want to transfer to a more design-oriented team. After 6-7 months, I expressed my desire to work with the controls engineering team, tuning a Kalman filter used in a device subsystem. I was in close contact with the controls engineer and informed him of my desire as well. About a month later, I hear that my classmate from UNH is hired for the position. Naturally, this didn’t sit well with me. Again, about a month later, I’m cold called on LinkedIn by an Ansys recruiter, and then that whole thing happens.

I had been accepted into the University of Washington while at DEKA, Dartmouth College while at Ansys, and now Worcester Polytechnic Institute. I am very certain that I would benefit from graduate education, as I have tighter focus and more context regarding the industry.

The opportunity is intended to result in a doctoral degree, which will take at least four years, but I am fine with this.

There is a lot I don’t know about, not just limiting myself to mechanical engineering or CFD, but also software, electrical, and computer engineering, statistics, pure mathematics, and much more. I have been maxing out my technology skills without advancing my theoretical skills.

I have a pretty sweet opportunity with remote work and this studentship, and I hope I am able to handle the workload with grace.