Rice Graduate

Johnny Jones, 9 April 2004

As I was looking for inspiration this week, I glanced at my "Bryan" folder. This time I looked beyond "Wedding Party," "Wedding Play," "Wedding Program," and "Order of Ceremony," and I found this essay Bryan wrote when he was applying for graduate school at Rice.

As a child, electronics fascinated me; I wanted to understand why my favorite older calculator had to have a big 9 volt battery, when Mom's credit-card sized calculator ran on a watch battery. A Radio Shack 100-in-1 kit provided hours of fun and fascination for me; it was awesome that I could assemble something that worked by connecting multicolored wires in the correct order.

By my sixth grade year in school, I loved not only assembling but also creating. For my science project that year, I designed and built an electronic adder from logic chips I bought at Radio Shack. In high school, my science projects became more complex: a radio-controlled tank able to find its way around obstacles as a prototype of a delivery system for a hospital; a robot equipped with sonar and a water gun to tackle the hazards of underground fires in the lead mines of my hometown.

As an undergraduate at Rice University, I was amazed to learn in my first electronics course, Elec 241, that differential equations and LaPlace transforms were the tools of choice to describe basic circuits. Computers communicated in Pascal or C; circuits communicated through complex mathematics, and by learning their language, I could command the circuits to behave as I instructed - as if I, the sorcerer's apprentice, suddenly saw the broom begin to move and sway before my eyes. Yet, as I learned in Elec 342, I was but an apprentice, and my circuits often moved against my commands. The fascination remained - the more I could understand, the more I could express my creative desires in circuitry; the more I could design features to help others.

As a senior at Rice, I participated in a four-person design team, with the goal of designing a better prosthetic arm for amputees. The most advanced existing designs allowed the wearer only to open and close a motorized hand; more common designs simply provided their wearers with a cleverly-designed hook with which to manipulate the world around them. As I delved into the project, I began learning of tiny myoelectric currents, produced in the human body as muscles expand and contract; evaluating signal-processing algorithms designed to listen to these currents and determine which muscle was being moved; and investigating robotic hands with which to carry out the commands determined by the algorithms.

At the end of a full school year spent on the project, followed by a summer position doing continued work on the project, I came to mixed results. The project was far from done - although I had investigated several ideas, I lacked the time and knowledge to implement many of my concepts. These lessons come from practical design experience I did not yet have. I was intrigued by this opportunity to do research, to carry out a science project with better resources and deeper knowledge, and my desire was to create and design products and processes that could be used in the real world. I knew that someday, in order to do this, I would need more knowledge.

After finishing my summer position at Rice, I moved on to the professional world with the Compaq Computer Corporation. There, I was given the opportunity to experience in the lab what I had learned in theory, and come to a practical understanding of, and feel for, high-speed digital design. As a high school student, I used my limited knowledge to design prototypes of real-world equipment that has since been manufactured. I look forward to continuing my quest both to develop new ideas, and construct them, solving real-world problems, which began as high school science projects and now continues though graduate study.

Bryan is working on biologically-inspired robotics at Clemson University in South Carolina.