Emily Satterfield likes to build. No matter if she’s crocheting a costume she saw on TikTok, baking a cake, dancing at Cambridge’s Havana Club, or tinkering on a venture, she fills her times with activities that channel her seemingly endless creativity.
“Being innovative has normally been a enormous element of who I am. I get a new hobby each individual 7 days. I just love anything that involves producing items,” says Satterfield ’22, who not too long ago graduated from MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering.
Lifted in Lowell, Massachusetts, Satterfield was surrounded by creativeness from a young age. Her mother is a instructor with a passion for art and oil painting. Her father is an electrical engineer with a knack for do-it-on your own automation tasks. Rising up, she considered of artwork and engineering as two independent entities. You could not be each an artist and an engineer.
“I always imagined that engineering and art were being opposites and you couldn’t genuinely do the two,” she states.
On enrolling in MIT, Satterfield set out to examine electrical engineering at MIT. But she swiftly located herself gravitating far more towards mechanical engineering. For her, generating robots transfer was exhilarating.
A single of her initial prospects to build a robot came in the spring of her sophomore yr. She enrolled in 2.007 (Design and style and Manufacturing I). Learners in the class design and style and establish their individual robots. The class culminates in a boisterous ultimate robotic competition.
But midway as a result of the semester, Satterfield and her fellow pupils ended up despatched house because of to the Covid-19 pandemic. Stuck at dwelling, she craved a innovative outlet and took up drawing. Her time in quarantine served her know that her twin passions of art and engineering did not have to be mutually distinctive.
“That’s when I began to notice that art was who I was,” she states. “Especially as a mechanical engineer, I recognized how engineering and artwork are not opposites. They truly go hand-in-hand. When you’re building or constructing one thing, you are practically making some thing new.”
Her travel for creation led her to an undergraduate exploration opportunity, identified as a SuperUROP, with Professor David Hardt. The challenge examined the use of additive manufacturing to make lower-cost homes for people today enduring homelessness. The objective is to make the most of tactics like 3D printing to construct light-weight homes produced out of recycled plastics. She continued perform on the project for her senior thesis.
In the senior capstone class 2.009 (Product Engineering Procedures), Satterfield experienced an prospect to merge her appreciate of art and engineering additional. Fairly fittingly, her group created a prototype for a device named “Palette.” The portable solution permits painters to tint paint to the exact shade they need to have onsite, getting rid of time-consuming visits to the paint retailer. The team worked with Benjamin Moore to produce their product.
Doing the job with her fellow mechanical engineering pupils on a significant, intensive job like Palette gave Satterfield a preview of what doing the job on an engineering crew in industry would be like.
“Most Program 2 students like building items and chatting about the factors they make, which lends perfectly to teamwork and instructing each and every other unique matters. Innovative engineers are definitely superior teammates, and I consider which is quite legitimate about most Program 2 pupils,” she says.
Just after graduating in May possibly, Satterfield joined the innovative engineers at SpaceX. Over the summer, she participated in the company’s associate plan.
Satterfield now operates as a structures engineer for the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft crew. She and her coworkers build technologies for the spacecraft. In early Oct, as the crewed Dragon took off from Cape Canaveral, technologies that Satterfield worked on have been on the spacecraft.
“It was genuinely awesome to see anything that I aided do the job on have an impact. Being aware of that there are folks within the spacecraft really put points into point of view,” she provides.
In spite of her occupied schedule, she continue to has managed to obtain new hobbies — the newest of which entails refinishing home furniture for her new apartment in California. Regardless of what the long run retains, Satterfield will continue to go after outlets for her creativity.
“I’m energized to see extensive time period how I can acquire my weird, kind of discombobulated passions and blend them into my very own issue,” she claims.